Discovery Space: Next Generation

Kentucky Students Send Payload to (not quite) Space

Does your state have a space program? Does your college?

Don't answer too quickly -- if you think the answer is no, you might be surprised.

Kentucky might not be among the first places that comes to mind when you think about space activities, but in fact the state has a very active and enthusiastic program, focused on getting college students actively involved in hands-on space-related research, but also providing opportunities for high-school and even grade-school students as well.

Kentucky Space is working toward the first launch of a student-built satellite next year, but in the meantime they're not just sitting around waiting. They're doing real tests, sending payloads up to just a bit below the edge of space, using high-altitude helium balloons. Their first such test, and a big success, was completed just last week, on July 14.

The balloon soared to a height of more than 91,000 feet, or almost 20 miles, before it burst and the payload parachuted back to Earth. The payload contained a navigation navigation unit, a magnetometer, two cameras, and communications equipment, almost entirely built by Kentucky college students.

In addition to testing systems for use in satellites to be launched starting next year, the system also tested possible emergency monitoring and communications systems that might be used in the case of a natural disaster or other emergency.

The student engineers were from Western Kentucky University,the University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, Murray State, Morehead University, and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. All of these are part of a NASA-funded program called the Kentucky Space Grant Consortium.

This is just the beginning for Kentucky college students. According to a report in the Louisville Courier-Journal, "We hope to have four to six balloon launches a year, testing systems that will ultimately go into orbital satellites," said Kris Kimel of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corp. "We're also looking at deep-space missions four or five years into the future."

Besides the serious payloads built by the college students, the balloon also carried a bunch of tiny capsules made by local grade-school students. The capsules were made by cutting open ping-pong balls, putting objects inside and then gluing them back together, to give the younger kids a chance to participate in the mission and encourage them to think about participating in future student missions as they get older.

Kentucky Space even has a blog to keep students abreast of what's going on in the program, as well as information about related space activities.

(Photos: Top and bottom: The view from Balloon 1; middle: Preparing for launch. Photos courtesy of Kentucky Space)

 

An Inch Deep in Wonderland

That title is a lovely phrase, plucked from a story today about the first wet-chemistry tests ever done off of the Earth, and it describes the location that the soil sample was taken from for that test: The bottom of one of two trenches the Phoenix Mars lander has dug in the immediate vicinity of its near-polar landing site, which the team have dubbed Wonderland and Snow White.

And what did Phoenix find there? A preliminary analysis from an experiment to test the soil chemistry shows that, far from being the deadly acidic soil some scientists expected, it's actually mildly alkaline -- good for planting asparagus, some reports point out (but only after you add some organic material to the soil, and add a nice greenhouse to filter out the sterilizing ultraviolet light and to keep it warm).

Garden soil! On Mars! And perhaps within our lifetimes, gardeners to take advantage of it, for a little high-tech subsistence farm in the first Mars settlements.

It occurs to me that we now have the information in hand to help make that possible. Until now, we've only had the most rudimentary sense of what the chemical makeup of Mars soil might be (and of course, now we're only learning what it is in one spot, but at least it's a start -- and it's a darned interesting spot).

Even with the rough analysis and guesswork we've had to live with, people have done some interesting work. Various groups have built "Mars jars" to test the potential of Martian soil to sustain various kinds of plant life. Israeli biologist Amos Nur did some of the best of these analyses of the soil's potential.

But that was all child's play. Now we have what the University of Arizona, where the mission was designed and is being run, calls a "treasure trove" of new data. How soon will it be before people start using that information?

And here's the thing: Just about anybody can start doing the research now, as the chemical details get published by the Phoenix team.

"We are awash in chemistry data," said Michael Hecht of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, instrument on Phoenix.

By recreating the details of chemistry, as they are being unraveled by MECA and Phoenix's other lab, called the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, and the soil's structure as determined by its high-resolution microscope, people can now start doing the true experiments that may someday help those Martian colonists know what to plant, and how -- helping to create a sort of Farmer's Almanac for Mars.

It could be done at just about any level of complexity and detail -- anything from a killer science fair project to a really cutting edge Masters or Doctoral thesis topic to a lifetime's worth of professional study. Just jump right in there at whatever level you may be, dammit! There are many thousands of different species of edible plants known, and many different ways of planting, cultivating and harvesting them. There's virtually no limit to how many different ways people could approach the research. The more the better. Let's start developing the veggies that the future Martians -- are you one of them? -- are going to live on.

Future farmers of Mars, get to it!

(Photos courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute).