Billings, Mont. - Miranda Gallagher, a senior middle blocker from Lead, N.D., has been a key part of Rocky Mountain College's volleyball team since transferring from Sheridan College in 2018. In 2019, she earned first team all-conference honors after recording 235 kills and 67 total blocks. However, one of her proudest achievements as a student-athlete was her work last summer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Working with the Montana Space Grant Consortium alongside Rocky Mountain College professors, Gallagher had the opportunity to spend the summer of 2019 researching Montana's native snapping turtles for NASA. Her team spent the summer setting turtle hoop traps in local waterways to track and tag the snapping turtles. The traps were checked regularly and each turtle captured led to important data collection. Tagging the turtles sheds light on travel and hibernation patterns of the species, a key goal of the research.

Montana's snapping turtles and outer space may seem like an odd pairing at first. Yet for humans to understand life outside of Earth, as Gallagher explained, they first have to understand what's living on it.

"Turtles, especially snapping turtles, spend a lot of their life underwater and in Montana, a lot that is when is frozen. It's a lot of anoxic conditions which means that there is no oxygen," said Gallagher. "Which kind of relates to NASA because there is no oxygen and it's kind of like being in outer space."

She credits her time playing for the Battlin' Bears as helping her develop important skills required of her degree.

"You can't be by yourself all the time. It doesn't work when you are doing field work. You work with a lot of people," said Gallagher. "I think volleyball helped with that as far as having communication skills and leadership skills."

Miranda will graduate next May with a degree in environmental science. She plans to find a wildlife job with the Forest Service before pursuing a graduate degree in wildlife biology.