When Bradley Jackson, a junior in mechanical engineering, received an email from his advisor telling of an internship opportunity with NASA, he figured he may as well apply, not thinking much of the application.

He applied to work at a number of bases and research facilities around the country: Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. But a letter followed, notifying him he had not received any of them.

It wasn’t until he was moving out of his dorms for the summer that he got another call from NASA. This time, the group offered him a job at the Ames Research Center in Ames, Calif, a town an hour outside of

San Francisco.

It was at Ames where Jackson worked on a self-sustaining unmanned aerial vehicle — a project he will be presenting this weekend in Greensboro at the state’s Undergraduate Research Symposium.

“The group was given the frame of a Cessna and had to put a computer in it and get it off the ground,” Jackson said.

After flying out to California, Jackson met with the two other interns he would work with — one from UC Berkeley, the other from Dartmouth. As a mechanical engineer, Jackson’s job was to reinforce the plane enough to hold the computer to get it in the air.

The finished plane was about four to five feet long, with about a seven-foot wingspan, according to Jackson. Once the structure was set, Jackson began working on installing the engine and the machines to control the plane’s flaps.

“The first eight weeks of the job were pretty much all design work,” Jackson said. “The rest were the actual installing time.”

Though the plane is now property of NASA and will stay in California for now, Jackson is preparing a poster and presentation to bring with him to Greensboro, where he will hope to again catch the attention of the NC Space Grant program.

“They were the ones who paid my salary in California, so it’ll be good to talk with them about my experience,” he said.

Next to Jackson’s project at the Ames, researchers were working on other projects, such as wind resistance to box cars and the aerodynamics of a tennis ball.

It’s that variety in work that inspired Jackson’s interest in working for NASA in the future, after finishing his degree in mechanical engineering and possibly pursuing graduate work in aerospace engineering.

With the attention he’ll get from the symposium and the project he worked on last summer, Jackson hopes to return to Ames this summer.

“I already know all the people there, so it’d be fun to go back there again,” he said.