Discovery Space: Next Generation

What Building a Spaceship Is Like

From June to September this year, I lived out one of my dreams: working alongside some of the smartest engineers alive today to help build a spaceship (and I got paid for my help).

This magical place isn't Disneyland, but does invoke the same excitement in the hearts of engineers around the world. It's a company that I think will change the world, and it's called Space Exploration Technologies -- "SpaceX" for short.

SpaceX gives its interns in Hawthorne, Calif. the menial tasks of "computational fluid dynamics," "finite element analysis," and so on -- and expects the material to be known thoroughly within a week or two, of course. I was one of these interns, and what was in store for me was plenty enough to make my heart beat just a little faster for the rest of my life.

A spacecraft meant to ferry people calls for a window, so I was given the task to design a testing apparatus (from scratch) for the windows on SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

I was supervised, seeing as I had many questions on how to climb the proverbial brick walls laid before me. Some of those walls included how to navigate the not-so-user-friendly software analysis tools, whether to choose between steel or aluminum for the testing device, what the best fastener choice was, and so on.

Since the company's inception by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, SpaceX has been on course to disrupt how the world views space. Currently it costs millions, sometimes billions of dollars to reach orbit. In the near future, SpaceX plans on reducing this cost by about 10 times of what it is today.

Think it can't be done? It's already been started... In September 2008, SpaceX tried a fourth launch of their Falcon 1 rocket and successfully carried a 363-pound payload into orbit (watch the video below). SpaceX will charge about $8 million for similar rocket launches, versus competitors' $20-$40 million price tag per launch of a similar size.

In the near future, I hope space will be just another place where people live, business is a day-to-day affair, and transportation is cheap. When that day comes, I'll be proud to have been a small part in the beginning of the future.

James W. Pura is a mechanical engineering undergraduate at University of California, San Diego, specializing in entrepreneurial space.

Photos, top to bottom: James Pura; SpaceX

Paving the Moon

A couple of years ago, I landed an internship at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. with a mission: to help finish the design, construction and testing of a prototype "dust mitigation vehicle".

I couldn't wait to get started, but I had a few questions -- what exactly is a "dust mitigation vehicle," and why would we need one?

The "why" is pretty surprising. During the Apollo program, lunar dust (or "regolith" as the geologists like to call it) proved to be a significant challenge. Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan even went as far as to say, "I think dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon. I think we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems except dust."

The fine-grained particles wore through the outer layer of astronauts' spacesuits, caused seals to leak, scratched visors and even affected astronauts' health with breathing issues. Whenever the regolith so much as touched a piece of equipment, astronauts found it nearly impossible to clean.

Those are a just a few reasons why lunar dust is so problematic.

As Ryan mentioned in his September 25th blog entry, it is extremely abrasive, meaning that it is able to scratch most things with which it comes into contact. I suppose I'd compare it to ground-up shards of glass. To make matters worse, the dust is statically charged. If you've ever rubbed a balloon on your head, you can wave the balloon over pepper grains to make them cling to it. Same concept with moon dust, except that instead of pepper the astronaut attracts microscopic, razor-sharp particles.

No surprise, then, that NASA spends a lot of time and resources to find ways to both prevent dust from getting on equipment and to remove it if necessary.

The Dust Mitigation Vehicle (or “DMV”) that I worked on is one of these methods. It's a prototype of a rover that would pave the surface of the Moon. It doesn't use asphalt or concrete, but rather sunlight -- something of which we have a nearly unlimited supply on the moon!

The DMV is essentially a rover with a giant converging lens mounted to it. Ever used a magnifying glass to burn leaves (or even poor, defenseless ants) during the summer? Again, same concept.

The vehicle's lens tightly focuses sunlight on area ahead of the vehicle, causing the regolith to reach temperatures well above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- this heat melts the moon dust into a hard, dust-free surface. Run the DMV long enough, and you can create roads or even landing pads. When astronauts or other rovers travel on these hardened areas, they would no longer kick up dust.

I hope that some day vehicles similar to the DMV traverse the surface of the Moon and build roads as they go. If that doesn’t happen, I suppose I could open my own chemical-free ant extermination business. Either way, working on this project has been personally rewarding -- and a lot of fun.

Brandon Hall is an aerospace engineering undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has conducted research with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center focused primarily on In-Situ Resource Utilization.

Photos: Courtesy of Brandon Hall/NASA

Captions, top to bottom:

• Overseeing DMV operation. I'm using welding goggles to protect my eyes from the intense focused sunlight.
• The Dust Mitigation Vehicle with the large Fresnel lens clearly displayed
• Partially and fully “paved” samples.
• A profile shot of the DMV.

Designing NASA's New Moon Crib

I never expected to find myself working on a project with NASA, mainly because I wasn't particularly gifted in math or science. The most I remember from high school chemistry class was the teacher shouting, "That was spontaneous!" every time he caught us rolling wooden molecules across the linoleum floor.

Now, as an industrial design student heading into a second year of grad school at the Rhode Island School of Design, NASA is exactly who I'm working with. 

The connection bewteen RISD and NASA started with Michael Lye, my dedicated professor, throughout a decade of coursework that brought the two institutions together. Thing is, design school can be short on real-world constraints, often drifting into conceptual and theoretical regions, while NASA has no shortage of constraints.

It was a wonderful match.

I was hired along with four other students for a summer to work on NASA's new lunar lander suitlock/airlock project for the lunar habitat -- a setup the agency plans to use for extended stays on the moon. The major challenge facing astronauts once they arrive? Moon dust.

Inside an astronaut's living space, moon dust can be a big hazard by causing allergic reactions and grinding away at small parts in equipment. So NASA asked for a habitat that could keep lunar dust out.

Other factors we had to consider included strong, protective storage places outside of the living quarters and space suits tough enough to handle the moon's unforgiving conditions. Also, the astronauts needed to be comfortable in their spacesuits, able to reach the suit storage containers, and go into and out of the habitat safely and easily.

With Michael at our side, we took a first crack at the habitat and improved NASA's "Mark III" space suit design. It was essentially a clean slate: Help astronauts get into new one-piece-style suit, get out of the habitat, then get back safely. The rest was up to us.

After weeks of conference calls with the Human Factors team in Houston, we quickly found our tasks snowballing, and were proposing designs for dozens of things: the hinging mechanisms on the door, way-finding signals, foot and hand supports, bulkhead formations, airlock space, and on and on. The complexity of each spacey challenge quickly became apparent to us as we worked.

Our mission, however, wasn't all work and no play. A particularly fun phase came when we built a one-sixth gravity harness in our studio, then put the suit through a number of physical tests to see if it would hold up in true moon-like conditions. (Also check out the video at the end of this post.)

In mechanical engineering humans needs often come last, but we had to put the body first. We started by comparing the body with the original Mark III design. Unfortunately, the prototype is a multi-million dollar piece of equipment, so we couldn't physically get our hands on one. Instead, we spent weeks researching and talking to the makers, then constructed our own rendition of the suit -- keeping in mind the capabilities and limitations it put on the wearer, of course.

For example, could he or she see over her shoulder?  (Nope.) Asking such simple questions created a domino effect of design needs: When astronauts bend their knees in the suit, at what angle of knee bend did the suit and body weight become too great to push up to standing position? And so on.

Unlike countries that put restrictions on their spaceflyer height, American astronauts are a wide range of heights -- so the suitlock and airlock needed to be adjustable (yet another aspect we had to take into consideration). And after studying a set of gorgeous, custom-built astronaut gloves, we got a sense of how limited astronaut dexterity and mobility would be. That's a big deal, because we knew the astronauts would need to use small pieces of hardware. 

By starting with the design approach, I think we were able to innovate in ways we might not have if we began with a focus on engineering. In the long run, I hope our work creates a more comfortable (and productive) experience for astronauts visiting the moon.

Julianne Gauron is a second-year industrial design student at the Rhode Island School of Design. For more information about the RISD NASA collaboration see, click here.

NASA-JPL is a Hotbed of Student Activity

About 300 students at all levels, from high school through graduate school, have been working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California over the summer. And the 25 different programs that the lab offers for students are not just summer work -- about half of them are academic-year positions.

And they span the gamut, from engineering to data analysis to planetary science.

These are amazing opportunities for anyone interested in working in space science of any kind. Here's just a few examples of the work students have been doing at what is certainly the world's premier center for designing and operating planetary exploration missions. (No offense to Ames, which is NASA's other principal planetary research center, but which doesn't actually build and operate as many robotic missions).

-- Yuri Carillo, 18, is a sophomore in electrical engineering Cal Poly who has been working there this summer. She actually put in her first stint working at JPL while she was still in high school. She's worked on a gadget to help a Mars robot change drill bits, and on batteries for a future rover. "Before I came I thought it was going to be very serious and uptight, and then I realized it's more like a college campus," she says.

-- Brandon Jones, at 28, is a bit farther along -- he's a PhD student in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado who has been working on satellite navigation systems, tracking the positions of the GPS satellites that are used to track everything else. He spent a previous summer working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, so he's really racking up his mileage at NASA.

-- It's not just hard-core technology types who can find a niche at JPL. Take Erin Edkins: She's a 28-year old student who spent time as a personal fitness trainer and a restaurant manager before deciding to go back to school in planetary science at  UC Santa Barbara. Now a senior there, she's putting in her second summer at JPL. She works on planetary atmospheres and is analyzing the swirling storm systems on Jupiter.

As part of that job, she enjoys being often the first person to see new planetary images that arrive from a distant planet. Her advice to other students is to just go ahead and apply for a JPL internship, as she did.

"Go for it," she says. "Definitely the worst thing that could happen is you could contact someone to work with at JPL and they say no. Then you're in the same position you started in."

You can read up on JPL's student opportunities on their web site. There's something for just about anybody who's interested in doing space-related work. Go ahead, give it a try!

photos: top, Yuri Carillo. bottom, Erin Edkins. photos courtesy of NASA/JPL.

Setback for SpaceX is Setback for Student Space Projects

SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies, is one of the most interesting companies in the world right now to keep an eye on. If I were a billionaire -- and hey, I'm only a billion or so short of being one -- I would be pouring investment money into the company, and expecting a handsome return on it in a few years.
Yesterday, Space-X had their third launch failure in as many attempts. Or, as the company's founder Elon Musk prefers to describe it, their third "partial success." Ok, he has a point -- most of the innovative Falcon 1 rocket's parts worked perfectly. The first stage, using a brand-new rocket motor and structure and control system, worked without a hitch. But, for the second time, there was a problem with the separation between the first and second stages, and so the payload -- in this case, three separate satellites -- never made it to orbit.
Musk, who made his fortune in the Internet, by founding PayPal and then selling it to eBay, vows to keep on trying. In a letter posted on the SpaceX website, he declared flatly "There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport.  For my part, I will never give up and I mean never."
I admire Musk and his innovative plans, and I believe his commitment is real. And in addition to his personal fortune of a few hundred million, he says he has obtained substantial outside investment to keep the company's plans on track. And even NASA is backing him, as part of its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program to provide resupply services to the International Space Station.
Why does any of this matter to students? In fact, it matters in a big way, because SpaceX is one of about a half-dozen companies that are working hard to bring down the cost of sending things into orbit by at least an order of magnitude, and hopefully by two orders of magnitude, over the next few years. And if he or any of the others succeed (and frankly SpaceX is one of the top two or three candidates, and the one likeliest to succeed first), it will completely revolutionize the entire space business.
And among the very first people to benefit from that dramatic cost reduction will be students and academic researchers. A whole host of science and engineering research projects that would have been too costly to even attempt could suddenly open up as practical and within reach. And other projects that might have taken many years to get to the point of actually getting into orbit might be able to get there on a timescale of months instead. It will truly be a new era for university-based projects in astronomy, communications, materials research, biology in microgravity, and exploration.
In fact, Musk has specifically already offered cut-rate launch services to some of the student teams that are competing in the Google Lunar X-Prize challenge, including a team from Carnegie Mellon University.
So we should all be rooting very hard for SpaceX, as well as for the other companies competing in this arena: Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos; Xcor, a company based in Mojave, California that has the most explicit plans to make its planned low-cost launch services available for academic research; Armadillo Aerospace, founded by John Carmack, creator of the videogame Doom; and  Virgin Galactic, the partnership between X-Prize winner Burt Rutan and Virgin  Group founder Sir Richard Branson. While Virgin Galactic's business plan is mostly focused on the tourist market, it is clear that their vehicles -- both the SpaceShipTwo rocket, and its carrier plane White Knight Two -- could be a great platform for research as well.

Musk says that he has another Falcon 1 rocket ready to go, and he's also going full-tilt toward test flights of the much bigger Falcon 9, which will be the most powerful US rocket in existence. I wish him well, and will be keeping a close eye on his progress, and will keep you all posted on new developments here in this blog. (By the way, the best way to keep track of developments in real-time when there's a SpaceX launch about to take off is through a blog by Elon Musk's brother Kimbal, called Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets after the Pacific island site where the tests are conducted). There's also a good analysis of yesterday's failure, and of Musk's overall approach, on the blog Space Transport News.
Good luck to all of the new generation of space pioneers represented by these daring startup companies, that are poised to revolutionize the way the space business works.

(Photo: Falcon 1's second launch attempt from Kwajalein Atoll last year, courtesy of SpaceX)

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)

 

A Texas Semester on Mars

The coolest place to be this summer is the polar plains of Mars, where the Phoenix spacecraft is scraping away at a layer of ice and looking for signs of organic chemistry. This is the most exciting thing to happen in planetary science since the amazing Mars rovers-that-will-not-die that landed more than four years ago.

And I practically feel like I've had a chance to be there and be part of it thanks to some wonderfully detailed firsthand accounts (another one here) by some college students who have been lucky enough to get into positions working on the mission.

As I've mentioned, this is the first time a mission to another planet has had its mission control center on a university campus. The University of Arizona, home of Phoenix chief scientist Peter Smith, is the place where the mission is run, and several students from around the country are having the experience of a lifetime working on various science and engineering teams there.

This week, we get to hear from a student from Texas A&M University. She's Keri Bean, a junior meteorology major from Schertz, Texas. Here's what she had to say about her lucky job:

"I've been interested in the space program for only a few years now. My first passion was with the weather. A severe storm passed over my preschool, and I came home that day and said "Mommy, I want to be a meteorologist when I grow up!" My mother patted my head and said "Sure thing, dear" thinking the next day it'd be a nurse, or a firefighter, etc. I never once flinched from this goal.

Space-wise, I've always had the typical Wal-mart telescope, but around 2002 I got a Meade ETX-70. I still was more focused on weather, but I was starting to pay attention more to astronomy. In 2005 I just happened to be in Florida during the week of the return to flight space shuttle launch, STS-114. I was about 7 miles away from the launch, and pulled over there on that side of the highway, I knew that I wanted to be doing that one day.

A year before I started at Texas A&M, I attended an event called Aggieland Saturday. The meteorology professor there noticed my interest in space exploration and told me to talk to a professor in the department, Dr. Mark Lemmon, the co-investigator of the Surface Stereo Imager (SSI). I sent him an e-mail the summer before I started, and I met with him every week since school started in the fall. He had me listen to Spirit & Opportunity planning teleconferences, and I did a small research project with some data from Spirit right before winter break. When I got back, he asked me if I wanted to work on Phoenix over the summer, I quickly agreed. He sent me to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) over spring break (it proves I'm a nerd that I would give up my spring break to attend a science conference), and while I was overwhelmed at first, it was a great learning experience for me. After that, I helped Dr. Lemmon prepare programs for use on Phoenix, and I arrived at the Science Operations Center (SOC) in Tucson, AZ a week before landing.

My title on Phoenix is SSI IDA, or Surface Stereo Imager instrument downlink analyst. I do a bunch of different jobs. While at the SOC, I operated a huge computer screen in the downlink room, and as the images were coming down, I would put the important ones up on the screen. Things like deliveries to TEGA or WCL, images of the trenches, the first set of microsope images, etc. would be put up on the screen. I also keep track of the time of day the mission success panorama images were taken, and which ones were partial. On landing day, my job was to take the images and put them up on the projector screens so everyone in the downlink room could see them. I was on a flexible time schedule, so my shifts would be anywhere from 5 to 10 hours long, depending on the number of images, how many projects I was doing, and the meetings taking place. Now that I'm back at Texas A&M taking classes, I don't do as much, but I still keep up with the mission and keep track of the panorama.

One of the other interesting tasks I do is maintain the Phoenix Facebook profile. I made one for Spirit & Opportunity many months ago as a joke, and now it seems nearly every NASA satellite, telescope, etc. has a Facebook profile.

Most of the other students are either documentarians, work for the atmospheric science theme group, or work on the SSI as engineers. I think most of the SSI team is comparatively young to the other science or instrument groups, which means we're getting the opportunity of a lifetime to work with these images and on some days, be the first to see these images from Mars. I can't think of a more awesome job.

One of the greatest aspects of this job, in my opinion, is simply meeting the scientists and engineers. I was so used to seeing these guys on documentaries or reading their papers that it was a bit of shock to not just meet them, but get to be on a first name basis or have them depend on your work that day.

I honestly still can't really believe I'm doing this job. If someone would have told me at this time last year what I'd be doing this summer, I would've laughed and told you to stop teasing me. It's a dream come true to be involved in such a historic mission. Back in the day, I always wanted to be Dr. Greg Forbes on the Weather Channel because he was the expert on everything, but now I can't imagine doing anything else. When I met NASA administrator Mike Griffin at the LPSC, I told him I was working on the rovers and soon Phoenix, but my eventual goal was to study the Martian atmosphere from the surface of Mars myself. He smiled and said he'd have to see what he could do about that. So here's to hoping!

I watched the landing at the SOC with the atmospheric science team. When they announced touchdown, I leaped out of my chair and one of my friends hugged me hard enough to lift me up off the ground. I ran around the room hugging all the friends I'd made in just my first week there. I met my professor's family and ate quickly at the banquet. The celebration was over quickly because my shift started about an hour after landing.

My family back in Texas and many friends watched the landing and first downlink footage. I was really visible during downlink, because when the camera turned on in the SOC, I was right below it, working on getting the images up on the projector screens. My mom said that her head and her heart knew that was me on NASA TV, but she still simply couldn't believe it. My friends think it's pretty cool that I'm so young and have been given this great opportunity. While I was in Tucson, a friend of mine met astronaut Sunita Williams (I'm a big fan of hers) and when my friend told Sunita that I'd be there if it weren't for me working on Phoenix, Sunita thought it was quite awesome that someone so young was working the mission. It's cool to know I have a fan in the astronaut corps!"

(Photos. Top, Clayton Chu and and Keri Bean in the PIT with the test model of Phoenix. middle right: Keri Bean working. Middle left:  Bean operating the computer screen at the SOC with scientists around. Professor Mark Lemmon is behind her, second from right. Bottom: Engineer Rob Manning and Bean in the PIT. Photos courtsey of Keri Bean)

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Are Students Taking NASA's Place?

Well, not really. But in terms of performing some functions that used to be the exclusive domain of NASA and some major aerospace contractors, they may indeed be filling a significant void. That's the gist of a story a few days ago on Space Review, called "Student satellites: encouraging trend or a sign of panic?"

The story says that there is a growing crisis in the aerospace business: The business is booming, but not enough new people are entering the field to fill the needed jobs. Back in 2002, a national commission called the Walker Commission was formed to look into the problem. They wrote:

"In the 21st century, the U.S. must continue to have a highly skilled, stable, secure, and growing aerospace workforce, and a citizenry that is well prepared in mathematics and science.” But, according to surveys, they found that “Engineering students ... gave the aerospace industry low ratings for its physical work facilities, exciting and meaningful tasks, opportunities for professional development and growth, and supporting and encouraging management.”

So, increasingly schools are taking matters into their own hands, in the US and in other countries as well, the article says.

One major program that has been offering college students -- and even some high-school students -- a chance to go ahead and design, build and operate real space hardware on their own is one that I mentioned here in a previous post: the National Space Grant Student Satellite Program. Under this program, students build satellites that fit into a standardized shape and size but can have a wide variety of purposes. They are called Cubesats, and have so far been successfully designed and built by students at Cornell, California Polytechnic, the Universities of Arizona, Kansas, Nebraska, and Hawaii, and Montana State, among others.

The satellites are small enough to be launched as "secondary payloads," sharing a ride to orbit as a piggyback add-on to major commercial satellite launches -- a very cheap way to get a ride to orbit.

"If these projects become widespread this may have a substantial impact on the 'enthusiasm gap'," the article says. Not to mention providing real, hands-on experience of the whole process of designing and building a satellite to survive the rigors of launch and the space environment, waiting for the launch and seeing what happens (some of these satellites were lost when a Russian rocket that was providing their piggyback ride crashed -- another lesson in the realities of the space business), and then actually controlling and operating the satellites if and when the do reach orbit.

In other countries, some students have had a chance to work on even more ambitious satellite projects, One of these was the Student Space Exploration and Technology Initiative Express satellite (SSETI), which was built by students across Europe working together through internet links. It was launched in 2005.

NASA is now going a step further, as I mentioned here in another post: NASA's Ames Research Center, under the direction of its head Pete Worden (a former Air Force officer who has been at the cutting edge in thinking about innovative approaches to space travel and research for a long time), has started a project to get students working on research satellites to go into orbit around the moon. The new project is called American Student Moon Orbiter (ASMO).

Apart from NASA, others have been initiating programs on their own. Numerous universities have initiated satellite projects on their own, and private agencies like the X-Prize Foundation have been offering additional opportunities (for example, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Arizona are collaborating with a student team working on an entry in the Google Lunar X-Prize, a prize of up to $30-million for the first independent (that is, not government funded) craft to reach the moon, travel at least 500 meters, and send back lots of pictures and data. The CMU and UAz students have vowed to achieve this by the time of the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. In other words, one year from today! (Happy Apollo 11 anniversary everyone! Read Ray Villard's blog entry today for some thoughts about the ever-popular ridiculous claims that the whole thing was faked).

NASA should probably be doing more to encourage, train, and offer interesting positions for the next generation of space engineers. But in the meatime, it's nice to know that there really are some chances for students to roll up their sleeves and do significant work that will actually get to fly.

(Photos: Top 2 pictures from University of Toronto, showing cubesats attached to rocket payload ready for launch, and a collection of cubesats going through final checkout. Lower photo: SSETI satellite, courtesy of ESA)

 

Another Semester on Mars

The most exciting thing going on this summer in the planetary sciences is the ongoing mission of the Phoenix Mars lander. It's been scraping and baking the sheets of ice just under the soil there for a month and a half, and is about to begin baking another batch. This might be the one that reveals whether there are organic molecules in the Mars soil, which would be a very exciting new result.

As I've mentioned before, Phoenix is bringing not only a bonanza of data for our understanding of the Martian environment, but in chances for college students to be involved right on the front lines of the greatest space mission going. Because Phoenix is the first planetary mission to be controlled from a college campus, the opportunities for hands-on involvement by undergraduate and graduate students has never been greater.

I've highlighted some of those student experiences before. Here is another look from the inside at what it's like to be virtually sitting on the surface of Mars this year, digging and scraping into its hidden secrets. There are also some good lessons in these accounts about how students have managed to work their way into positions that space scientists used to only dream of. Many thanks to those of you who have written in about your experiences. And if you're reading this and you've been working on Phoenix or any other space or astronomy first-hand project this summer, please write to me about it. Or you can post comments below.

Before, we heard from students at Washington University of St. Louis, thanks to the very central involvement of Ray Arvidsen, a savvy veteran of many planetary missions. This time, it's an aerospace engineering student right at University of Arizona, Clayton Chu, who is spending this summer working as a Surface Stereo Imager Downlink Engineer.

Here's what Clayton had to say about the job:

"This is (hopefully not) a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me! It has always been my dream to work for NASA since I was a child, so to be actually doing it is just astounding to me. I pretty much love space and engineering, so any combination of two will get me excited.

"I am originally from Gilbert, Arizona. I have always been interested in the space program since I could remember, and one of the main reasons I went to the UA in the first place was because of the Phoenix mission. It was basically pure luck that I became a part of the mission.

"Last summer, I was sent an application from the UA/NASA Space Grant Consortium, a program where undergraduates are granted research internships with various science and engineering labs or companies. I applied and got in, but I did not choose where I could be placed. It was only luck that I was chosen to work for the Mars Lander. I began my internship with the mission last September; in April, I was hired full-time for surface operations. If we get funding for an extended mission, I will be a part of it until about November or December.

"I am an Instrument Downlink Engineer (IDE) for the Stereo Surface Imager (SSI), the primary camera operating on Mars. I am just as important a role as any other IDE for other instruments. I help maintain the health and safety of the instrument; analyze and interpret the data and images that the lander has sent back to Earth; and help investigate anomalies or do other tasks related to the SSI. Some things we look for include if our instrument actually took all the images we told it to take, the  temperatures of the different motors, and what images we received yet were partial.

"When I am off-shift, I am usually writing data analysis programs to assist in interpreting the downlink. The information about our instrument is contained in giant documents sent by the lander that contain info about all instruments, so it gets very difficult to review and determine in a timely manner our health and if all the images were wanted were actually executed. The analysis process used to take a few hours; now it takes 15 minutes on a nominal day. If everything ran smoothly, we can focus on analyzing our images and not worry about our instrument; if there were anomalies or other problems, the tools give us organized-enough information that we can quickly find issues. My tools have been used several times in both operations simulations and surface operations to detect anomalous results in the data.

"I am a full-time employee, so I am officially working  40 (but more like 50-60) hours a week. The IDE shift is 8.5 hours long, and it's pretty intense.

"There are two other undergraduates working with me on the SSI; one goes to Texas A&M, the other is a senior here at the UA. She has been my partner throughout both the Space Grant internship and now. The SSI team also has two graduate students and two just-graduated engineers. So the SSI is for the most part student-run, in a sense. "Other undergraduates work in education/public outreach or systems engineering and support."

Clayton even got to take part during the anxiety-filled landing on Mars, close enough to be part of the collective excitement. I was lucky enough to be at JPL for the last three successful Mars landings, so I was very sad to miss this one. Here's what Clayton had to say about being there:

"I was on-shift for landing day, so of course I watched the landing live! It was quite the experience as well; very emotional and exciting. I was shaking uncontrollably from the shock and awe of it all. A lot of us just got together and yelled for a good few minutes. Others were shaking hands, and some were crying. Our lead engineer for the day didn't do any of that, and just booked it straight to the SSI office to prepare for the incoming images.

"This job has definitely opened doors and allowed me to make connections to JPL and NASA. I thought it just a dream previously to be a mission manager or someone of importance working on a NASA mission; now I can see that with some work, it's entirely possible. One of the mission managers for Phoenix was actually a UA graduate, and even participated in the NASA Space Grant internship (after being rejected twice!), so it's very encouraging.

"My family are friends are extremely impressed and proud of me, of course. My parents can't stop talking about how cool it is that their son works for NASA; my friends believe I'm their ticket into flying into space. It's a great feeling."

Thanks Clayton, for sharing the experience with us. I will have another firsthand account from the Phoenix frontlines next week. Keep tuned to this space. And let's hear from some more of you!

(photos: top, NASA/JPL/UAZ; bottom, NASA)

Cooling it in Zero-G

A team of students from the University of Wisconsin in Madison has just reported on the results of a series of experiments they carried out this past April  -- while floating through the air. During two flights of NASA's Weightless Wonder C-9 zero-gravity research and training airplane, the UW team tested technology that could be important for future high-powered computers aboard spacecraft.
The more powerful a computer chip, the more dependent it is on efficient cooling, because high-speed operations will quickly cause the processor chips to heat up -- as you know firsthand if you've ever tried intensive computing tasks (such as playing videogames) on a laptop computer that's sitting on your lap. Ouch! Some people have literally burned their thighs that way.
With more powerful computers needed for critical tasks, the cooling problem gets even more severe.
Ordinary computers rely on fans blowing air over the chips to cool them, but for the really high-powered chips, spray-cooling with water or other liquids is much more efficient. Trouble is, that method depends on gravity to let the liquid run down to a collecting tray at the bottom so it can be pumped back up and cool again. What would happen if you wanted to use spray-cooling on a computer on a spacecraft in zero gravity? Well, it turns out nobody knew the answer to that question.
Until now, that is. The students from UW seem to have found the answer.
How? By taking advantage of an absolutely wonderful opportunity that NASA offers students every year, to propose zero-G experiments to be carried out aboard one of only a handful of facilities in the world that can reproduce the weightlessness (or technically, the microgravity) of space travel.
It's a chance to do real, cutting-edge research that can produce important results for the future of space research and exploration. And it's also an absolutely unbelievable experience, better than any amusement-park ride you've ever tried.
I can testify to that. I've gotten to go along for the ride twice, a few years ago, once with a team of students from MIT, and another time with a team from Wellesley College. There's really nothing quite like it. I've always wanted to fly into space someday, and this is definitely the closest I've come -- the next best thing to being there. (You can check out my stories on the Wellesley and MIT rides, in the Boston Globe, but unfortunately they charge to see them. Sorry)
And oh yes, they do call the NASA Weightless Wonder the "vomit comet," and for good reason. About half the people who fly on it do get sick. And yes, I did, both times. But that's ok, it was well worth it.
Anyway, back to the experiment.
UW professorTimothy Shedd has come up with a novel design for a spray cooling system, a linear array of nozzles that sprays a dielectric liquid directly onto the chip. He thought it might work in zero-G, but needed a way to test it. So that's where engineering students Lisa McGill,  Jessica Rybicki, Ben Conrad, and John Springmann and physics student Adam Beardsley, along with six other teammates, came in. They proposed the experiment, were accepted by NASA, and spent much of the winter building a 12-cubic-foot test system to try it out on the plane.
In mid-April, they flew to Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Weightless Wonder's home base, and got to try it out (the five I mentioned got to fly, and the other five were ground crew. I've corrected this post with the information from the comment below). The  plane flies a series of parabolic curves out over the Gulf of Mexico, and at the top of each curve, everyone and everything on board gets to float around for about 30 seconds inside the wide-open and well-padded interior of the plane. And oh yes, carry out their experiments. On each flight, the plane makes about 30 of these parabolas, providing about 15 minutes of cumulative weightless time.
Students are free to propose any kind of experiment at all, as long as it has some potential to produce new, novel, interesting results. Past flights have included every imaginable kind of test of tools and methods that might be useful for future astronauts -- everything from welding to using power tools, to studying the way flames spread in weightlessness (and how to put them out). They have also tested ideas that might be useful for recreation for astronauts on long space journeys -- weightless sports, painting, and dancing, for instance. (I actually saw the painting experiment. It made quite a mess)
Anyway, the UW team tried several different variations of the spray cooling, using different liquids and different angles of spray. And they did find one that seems to work very well. They hope to publish their results, and it may have applications eventually not just in space, but also in airplanes and even in ordinary laptops -- which aren't weightless, but they do get jiggled and turned a lot, which creates the same kind of problems.
Interested in proposing a weightless experiment of your own? It's actually one of the most exciting and interesting research opportunities available to undergraduates. Watch this space -- tomorrow, I'll have a listing of programs like this that students can apply for, along with the dates and rules for how to apply.
Well, that's it for now -- I've gotta go. It's a hot day, and this darn laptop is scorching my legs.
(Photos: top, Lisa, Jessica and Adam floating around, courtesy of UW. Bottom, the Weightless Wonder, courtesy of NASA)