HONOLULU — Data-collecting tools designed and built by University of Hawaii community college students and housed in an aluminum cube smaller than a shoe box will soon be launched into space as part of a NASA-funded rocket flight. ADVERTISING HONOLULU
HONOLULU — Data-collecting tools designed and built by University of Hawaii community college students and housed in an aluminum cube smaller than a shoe box will soon be launched into space as part of a NASA-funded rocket flight.
The nondescript cube houses electronics the students have designed to collect and analyze information about the sun’s ultraviolet rays, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Friday.
“It will measure the sun’s ultraviolet light above the Earth’s atmosphere. We want to know the total amount of ultraviolet light there is and eventually how it fluctuates over time because that will have an influence on the Earth’s atmosphere and eventually on climate,” said project manager Joe Ciotti, a professor of physics, astronomy and math at Windward Community College.
The project is an example of the university’s efforts to foster student interest in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) through project-based learning.
Sixteen students from Honolulu, Windward, Kapiolani and Kauai community colleges have been collaborating on the project — dubbed Project Imua — since the fall, when NASA awarded the campuses a two-year $500,000 grant as part of its Space Grant Competitive Opportunity for Partnerships with Community Colleges and Technical Schools.
Ciotti said the grant wasn’t project-specific, but instead aimed at exposing students to hands-on STEM experiences in aerospace engineering through scholarships.
Another objective, he said, was to test out a model for having a consortium of community colleges design and test small experiment packages for launch into space, or payloads, for possible collaboration with UH-Manoa’s Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory. The research facility partners with the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
The Project Imua unit will be placed inside a rocket measuring four stories high that will be launched in August from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The project will be sent approximately 100 miles up into space before being deployed with four other payloads designed by students at mainland universities, including Virginia Tech and the University of Nebraska. The UH campuses are the only community colleges participating in the launch.
The student experiments will be in flight for 15 to 20 minutes before falling back toward Earth and landing in the Atlantic Ocean. On the way down the payloads will be exposed to blazing-hot temperatures reaching 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and moisture from the ocean, requiring students to complete a litany of durability tests.
“We want to do all the stress we can possibly do before we take it up there,” said project mentor Jacob Hudson, who lectures in physics, astronomy, engineering and rocketry at WCC. “We don’t want to have wires disconnecting or anything cracking on the way up or down. We’ve spun it, baked it, shook it, and so far it’s survived everything.”
About half of the students working on the project assembled Thursday at UH-Manoa to perform what’s known as a shake test. The Project Imua unit was bolted to a machine that simulated the intense vibrations of a rocket launch and flight. After the test the cube was opened, and the small electronics were hooked up to computers to ensure they still worked.
