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By Mary George
A dozen Centaurus High School students are set to make history next month when they become the youngest group ever to design and launch an astrophysics experiment aboard a NASA rocket. The students, who are 16,17 and 18 years old, have spent the past three semesters building a 21-inch-long telescope that will collect data from the heavens and help pinpoint the age of the universe. "This has been an amazing project," said Centaurus junior Brian Gleeson, one of the science students who showed up on a day off from school to talk with a reporter about the experiment. "From the design to the building to working out the problems, it's been real science." Gleeson and his classmates got involved when Jim Green, an associate professor in astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, sought out some young rocket scientists. Green, who has sent experiments on 14 National Aeronautics and Space Administration launches, wanted to take advantage of the agency's education outreach program, which encourages professors to involve anyone other than university students in research.
The CU professor shopped his proposal
among Boulder Valley School District science teachers and got
the most enthusiastic reply from Centaurus' Julie Andrew and her
chemistry students. Students Chose Project The first thing the teens had to do was choose an experiment. Green gave them guidance and cut them loose. I wanted them to get a real taste of what it's like being a scientist, to see that we don't just sit around in white lab coats," he said. The Centaurus students began by sitting in on university lectures and reading and writing research papers about astrophysics, the branch of science that deals with the physics and chemistry of the universe. They proposed building a telescope that would collect ultraviolet light emitted by a particular heavenly body.
Such emissions hold clues about the
composition, origins and ages of stars, planets, nebulae and other
space phenomena. Students Win Argument But such data can be collected only from outer space because the Earth's atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet light. "At first I told them it couldn't be done," Green recalled. But the students, who call themselves "the rocket science team," argued successfully that they could make it work.
NASA budgeted $10,000 to machinemake
the parts needed to build the telescope. The students designed
a moveable filter so they can test two distinct wavelengths of
light, and Green contributed a detector for the assembly. Then
last month, Andrew and Gleeson traveled to the space agency's
Wallops Island Flight Facility on the Virginia coast to oversee
installation. Brief Moment of Glory The real test comes at 12:30 a.m. April 18, when their experiment is set to lift off from the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico. The experiment will collect data from the Dumbbell Nebula, a 48,000yearold body of hot gases emitted by a star 900 light years from Earth. All 12 of the students plan to attend the launch. They've raised $3,000 from local sponsors to pay for their trip.
The rocket will launch into suborbital
space, and the high schoolers' experiment will have just 250 seconds-a
bit more than four minutes-to collect data. A New Direction The next morning, after the payload has parachuted back to Earth, they'll retrieve their experiment and begin working on the data. Working with NASA confirmed Eric Hultgren's interest in space and engineering. "Most of us realize that things just don't get any better than this," the junior said. And it gave senior Amanda Taylor a new direction. "Before I got into this program, I thought maybe I'd go do something in business," Taylor said. "Now I've decided to go to CU and study this field." But the rocket science goes even further, said teacher Andrew.
"This has been an opportunity for
these students to associate with excellence, and sometimes that's
tough to do at a school with 1,800 kids," she said. "But
once students associate with excellence, they expect it in everything
else they do." |
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