An Oklahoma native, McKinney earned her bachelor\u2019s at the University of Tulsa, where she studied physics and applied mathematics. She had initially expected to pursue astrophysics, but a summer research internship at the University of Colorado at Boulder introduced her to plasma physics through a project involving dusty plasmas in the lunar environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was an incredibly interesting problem,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At MIT, McKinney has developed a small reactor that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and other products. The challenge now is separating out the oxygen before it recombines.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can actually perform the conversion step really well,\u201d she says. \u201cBut what happens in a plasma is we convert it, and then we get a mixture that needs to be separated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her current work pairs the plasma reactor with an oxygen-selective membrane designed to extract oxygen rapidly. The integration process isn\u2019t well-understood, leaving McKinney and her colleagues with questions about how the reactive plasma environment will affect the membrane.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not entirely sure what we will see,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
For McKinney, the possibility of connecting laboratory experiments to future human missions is what makes the work particularly rewarding.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get to work in a really cool lab and develop exciting experiments,\u201d she says. \u201cI get ownership over an entire experimental system, and then I get to connect that to performance requirements for a future Mars system. That\u2019s just the dream.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
That same philosophy has shaped McKinney\u2019s work beyond her thesis. Through MIT\u2019s Space Resources Workshop, she has participated in NASA competitions focused on sustaining humans in space. Her first competition involved designing a self-sustaining Mars mission for 10 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no clue what was going on,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u00a0 didn\u2019t know anything about space systems. So, my mentality was, let me jump in and learn.\u201d<\/p>\n