I recently made a return trip to BUA to deliver the All School Meeting on Sept 22nd. I talked about my summer adventures with NASA. I mentioned several opportunities for students at NASA that I wanted to mention here.
Several BUA students are working with students from Gann Academy to program a robot for the Zero Robotics competition. For this competition, there is no hardware involved. Students must program a robot to play a game autonomously. The first round of the game is played in a low friction environment (like an air hockey table). Teams making it to the final rounds get to compete on the International Space Station.
Zero Robotics
Zero Robotics on the International Space Station
Building on the Microgravity experience from the Reduced Gravity Flight Experience, where experiments are weightless for about 30 seconds, students can write a proposal for the experiment to fall in a Drop Tunnel for 2.2 seconds in the DIME or Dropping In a Microgravity Environment tunnel. Students get to travel to Glenn Research Center in Ohio to perform their experiment!
DIME
DIME Drop Tunnel
Young girls in 11th grade who want to spend a week at Johnson Space Center can apply for WISH.
If you want to send your experiment to the edge of space, you can do this from Wallops Island Virginia on either a Hot Air Balloon or a Sounding Rocket. You can also do this through NASA BalloonSAT in Ohio.
Hot Air Balloons in Ohio
Hot Air Balloon at Wallops Island
Sounding Rocket at Wollaps Island
BU SAT
Each summer, a few BUA students also working for Professor Fritz in the Photonics Center on the BUSAT program.
CubeSAT
This fall, I will be spending some time developing a prototype for the Bring It Back Microgravity Kit. The goal is that this experiment will fly on a rocket from Masten Space Systems some time in the coming several months. I will be looking for some BUA students to work on this experiment with me.
Masten XERO Rocket
Bring It Back Kit from Teachers In Space
