The Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler (L'SPACE): A New Mentor-Based Workforce Development Model for NASA Mission Student Collaborations

The Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler (L'SPACE) Program is the student collaboration portion of NASA's Lucy asteroid mission and is designed to engage higher education science and engineering students in meaningful, mentor-based, experiential STEM workforce preparation to enable a highly-qualified talent pool for NASA's workforce needs. Students are being recruited nationally to participate in a series of collaborative trainings and internships that leverage the relevant and unique opportunities within NASA's Lucy mission to become better equipped and knowledgeable for future career opportunities.

To train the next generation of prospective mission-savvy scientists and engineers, the L'SPACE team is implementing a direct engagement strategy that will inspire, engage, mentor, and retain the interest of hundreds of undergraduate STEM students by providing access to workforce-relevant skills and learning the practices of NASA's mission processes within an exploration context - the Lucy mission.

This training will be accomplished by creating a national, virtual 12-week L'SPACE Academy, an outreach network (Lucy Asteroid Ambassadors) along with hands-on Lucy mission-related design challenges that will engage science and engineering pre-professionals in mentored, project-based learning. These entities will be national in scope and designed, implemented, fostered, and sustained by the L'SPACE Team at Arizona State University in partnership with the Lucy mission team at the Southwest Research Institute, and the Lucy Co-I team members. To enable a diverse participant pool, students will be recruited from science and engineering organizations that work with underserved groups.

All participants will work in a cross-disciplinary, team-centric environment to learn how to optimize team collaborations and to understand the value of other professional perspectives and ideas. All activities will be modeled using actual mission practices, language, and scenarios. Leveraging the richness and complexity of the Lucy mission's goals, as well as the exceptional talent on the science and engineering teams, the L'SPACE team will create relevant, authentic STEM experiences for students through which they will catalyze and empower their career pathways in space science and engineering.