By Katy Human
Daily Camera
November 24, 1997

Every Wednesday afternoon, a dozen students from Lafayette's Centaurus High School gather at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy in the University of Colorado's research park.

They're putting the finishing touches on a system designed to probe the orbital path of Jupiter's fifth moon, Io. A NASA rocket will launch their instrument from White Sands, N.M., sometime next spring.

Normally, the students study filters or design the mechanisms that will move around various parts of the device.

Last Wednesday, they discussed finances.

"Then Brian can end by asking for money," someone said as the students made plans for a Dec. 2 gig-an opportunity to explain to the public exactly what it is they've been doing for 18 months and a chance to ask for the money they need to travel to the launch site.

"It's kind of like a chance to see our work in action," said Brian Gleeson, the lucky student who gets to beg for donations in December.

Their project, dubbed CENTAUR, has been an appropriate introduction to all aspects of astrophysics research, from the exciting conceptualization of an experiment and the building equipment to the mundane gathering of money.

NASA provided most of the funds for the project. Jim Green, an astrophysicist at CU, included in a recent research grant request $10,000 for a mini-project to be designed, developed and built by local high school students. Green, graduate student Ryan McLean, electrical engineer James MacDonald and undergraduate students Audra Yamamoto and Stacy Varnes have given hours of their own time freely.

Several area high schools competed for the chance to work with Green, and the Centaurus team-led by science teacher Julie Andrew-won, Brian said in a practiced introductory speech for the December affair.

The experiment will ask a simple set of questions that haven't been appropriately answered by astrophysicists to date, said Eric Hultgren, a Centaurus student who has been with the project all 18 months: How much sulfur is there in the dust that trails Io in its orbit around Jupiter, and how is that sulfur distributed-smoothly or in chunks?

The answers, the students hope, will tell them a little bit about how Io's volcanoes work, and even how Jupiter's magnetic field is structured.

If everything goes as planned, Green said, the students may even author a scientific paper he'll help them submit to a research journal.

"Io's very volcanic," explained Amanda Taylor, another high school student who has stuck with the project, dubbed CENTAUR, since its inception. The moon's volcanoes spit out sulfur and hydrogen, she said

Some of that material escapes Io, and slips around the same path that Io takes around the planet, Eric said. To look for that sulfur, the students have designed a compact telescope with filters and a light-recording device.

"Each element has one wavelength," Amanda said. The students have used filters to tune their instrument so it measures only the wavelength of light reflected by the element sulfur.

If Io is only poorly visible when the rocket is launched, the instrument will train its focus on the poorly understood Dumbell Nebula to look at the composition of the gas ejected from a star 48,000 years ago.

The instrument has to escape Earth's atmosphere to take measurements, Eric said. NASA's rocket-called a sounding rocket-will soar above the atmosphere for all of three or four minutes before shooting back down to Earth 50 miles from its launch site.

And the students are dying to watch that happen-the only reason they bothered to put aside their engineering to plan a public event.

Project CENTAUR participants will discuss their work at the First Annual Rocket Gala Tuesday, Dec. 2, at the LASP Space Technology Building, 1234 Innovation Drive (off Colorado Avenue, just east of 30th Street in Boulder). There will be a reception from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., with presentations beginning at 4.30 p.m. and 5:15 p.m.

For more information on Project CENTAUR, call Julie Andrew at 665-9211 ext 7752 or email her at andrewsj@bvsd.kl2.co.us.