1. UNH Project SMART – A 1-Month, Residential Outreach Program for High School Students
Students working in the program get a wide variety of lectures, demonstrations, have hands-on research experience with real space physics hardware and data, build very real and functional scientific instruments that they fly on a high-altitude balloon payload of their own construction.
CubeSat:
A small satellite that is low cost, small and easy to launch.
The CubeSat Program was started in 1999 to: reduce cost and development time, increase accessibility to space and sustain frequent launches.
The goal of this project was to design a small, light-weight, and reliable mechanical boom to move the magnetometer away from the spacecraft to a fixed position.
Top right shows the starting concept for the design.
Bottom right shows what the students developed after a series of design concepts and testing.
This design is expected to fly in space in two years.
Project SMART runs through the month of July each year.
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The program just celebrated its 25th year working with high school students who are interested in building careers in science and technology.
There are three modules:
Biotechnology and Nanotechnology takes students through the science of genetic manipulation and engineering, in vitro fertilization, GMOs, stem cell research, and their ethical implications. The nanotechnology component examines nano-templates, microscopy, STM-scanning tunneling microscopes, and the related ethics.
Marine and Environmental Science takes students out into the fields, streams, mountains and seashore of New Hampshire to study the many environmental regions of the state. Students gather samples to study in the lab as they monitor changes in the ecology brought about by natural and man-made actions.
Space Science takes students into the scientific realm of space research:
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The figure shows the full day PNG for 3/16/2015 with events observed on both RBSP probes. The EMIC events are highlighted in different colors on the full day PNG. The bottom figure is an enlarged cutout of the events with the colors of the picture-frames matching the colors assigned in the full day PNG.
UNH Project SMART – A 1-Month, Residential Outreach Program for High School Students
Students working in the program get a wide variety of lectures, demonstrations, have hands-on research experience with real space physics hardware and data, build very real and functional scientific instruments that they fly on a high-altitude balloon payload of their own construction.
Our job was to construct the circuit that converted the SiPM’s signals from analog to digital data so it could be read by a microcontroller, and to program the circuit to run. The circuit was built with certain resistors to trigger the comparator at different voltages (inputs).
Hysteresis – setting of thresholds – can’t trigger the high threshold without triggering the low and vice versa. This means that instead of recording every time a pulse dipped below our low threshold or above our high threshold it would only record a tick.
Above is the schematic (the map) of the circuit board.
We used a breadboard to test the different resistors we needed to use to get the proper voltage threshold. We then constructed the actual circuit on the project board (right).
(above) A plot of H+, He+, and O+ ion fluxes observed by the Van Allen Probe-B on April 8th at 4:35 UT. The black lines are the nose structures identified by the NIR.
(above) A plot of the locations of the tips of ion noses in double nose events. H+
(eV)
He+
(eV) O+
(eV)
Students in Project SMART and Space Science (above) come from across the country and around the world to participate in this program.
Students who participate in the space science module of Project SMART work with UNH professors doing real research. They work with spacecraft data, computational modeling, and space hardware.
Students receive lectures and participate in demonstrations in college physics of relevance to their work.
Students learn to build electronic circuits and with those lessons they construct compact, but very real, scientific instruments that make meaningful measurements.
Students also construct a balloon payload that flies their instruments to the edge of space at 100,000 feet.