Students’ project bound for space
Built robotic arm, test platform for NASA experiment
Most kids get a top grade or award for their winning science projects, but 10 lucky students at Cambrian Park’s Stratford Middle School get the honor of launching theirs into outer space.
The seventh- and eighthgraders taking part in the select Stratford International Space Station Beta Program have built a robotic arm and test platform for an out-of-this-world experiment with NASA and the bragging rights that come with it.
“We’re sending it into space, so that is a huge accomplishment,” said team mechanical engineer Anousha Athreya.
Their project will take off Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket headed for the International Space Station. It will help NASA scientists measure how heat and humidity behave in a microgravity climate like space.
Last year Valley Christian Schools invited Stratford and nine other schools to participate in the one-year program it developed with the Quest Institute, which promotes STEM education and gives students across the country the chance to learn new mechanical and electrical engineering skills by working on real-life projects with NASA researchers. Science teacher Ben Guansing picked out team members based on recommendations from other Stratford teachers.
The teams were given several experiment templates to choose from; the Stratford kids decided to test convection in microgravity and the spreading of heat. It hypothesized that both sensors would gather equalized heat in microgravity since heat cannot rise without gravity. Starting last fall, the students met up after school several times a week to develop and perform their experiment.
“How we built our experiment was using the bread board and having a ceramic resistor which produced the heat, then we had two heat sensors on opposite sides and we would test how the heat spread,” said team project manager Meghan Bedi.
After running several test trials, they sent the program and data to the Quest Institute for uploading to a test platform that will be on the space station. NASA will transmit the data back to Earth once the trials are done using the test platform with a special Windows operating system.
“NASA’s going to use that data and then re-create the same experiment in space so it can be seen in microgravity,” said project communicator Nikhita Vaddineni.
Because heat and humidity are a common factor in all kinds of manufacturing, their project could eventually help by looking at the possible benefits of manufacturing in a state of microgravity.
“Knowing how convection works and knowing how different pressurized points of heat and humidity work in space, we can kind of gather that information and hopefully one day maybe NASA can use that as an advantageous point in manufacturing,” Bedi said.
The kids say they are grateful for an opportunity many people don’t get until they’re much older, if ever.
“Many kids imagine they won’t be able to do this unless they’re a NASA engineer or they’re working in NASA, but the fact that we were able to do this at such a young age is amazing,” Athreya said.