A team of engineering students at Lafayette’s Centaurus High School are sending a micro-gravity research project to the International Space Station on the SpaceX rocket set to launch later this month.
“I’ve wanted to be an astronaut since I was little,” said incoming senior Jack Carvalho, who plans to major in aerospace engineering. “It was so exciting to work on this.”
About 20 engineering students spent about 15 months designing and testing the experiment, which will study the effects of simulated gravity on bacterial lag phase in a micro-gravitational environment.
“They’ve put in a lot of time, so this is a really cool moment,” said Centaurus engineering teacher Brian Thomas.
Thomas is flying to Florida today to deliver the experiment — with a special freezer bag and a security waiver to avoid x-rays. Thomas and six students also are planning to go to Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to watch the launch, scheduled for June 28.
The project started with a team of three students — Carvalho, Abby Schmid and Bryan McCarty, all now incoming seniors — working through spring break in 2014 to research and submit a 10-page proposal.
The proposal was one of three micro-gravity research topics chosen from the Denver area in a Center for the Advancement of Science in Space contest.
The goal is inspiring students and getting them “thinking again science, engineering and math,” said Ken Shields, director of operations and educational opportunities for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space.
“It’s very much real world, project-based team learning,” he said. “We think this kind of learning is vital.”
The Centaurus students worked in three main teams: mechanical, biology and coding.
“It’s run like an actual professional project,” said Cooper McCormick, who graduated from Centaurus in May and is going to the University of Colorado at Boulder to study mechanical engineering. “It was really cool.”
On the mechanical side, the team designed a 10-centimeter-by-10-centimeter-by-15-centimeter box to hold the experiment and all its components, including an inner casing to hold vials, a motor and a control panel.
Gears — with the help of a $280 syringe of high-tech grease — keep the vials moving. Students then printed the pieces using the school’s 3D printer.
“None of us have designed anything for space before,” McCarty said. “The margin of error was non-existent.”
A box of filled with rejected 3D printed pieces attests to the difficulty of getting everything exactly right. The first gears weren’t strong enough and broke, sleeves for sensors would print too small or too large and holes for the vials printed too small.
“What we have now is completely different than what we first envisioned,” Schmid said. “You have to go through the cycle of testing it and then editing it. Then editing it brings up five more problems you have to fix. It’s not just about making it work when it doesn’t work, it’s about making it work better.”
For the experiment itself, the students will simulate gravity while growing E. coli bacteria.
Carvalho said bacteria grows more quickly in space, but there’s no answer as to why. Simulating Earth’s gravity in the micro-gravity environment of space allows them to isolate gravity as the variable.
“We want to see if the bacteria’s growth returns to normal,” he said.
For the ultimate test, six of the students took at trip in April to Houston to try the experiment on a zero-gravity plane, nicknamed the “vomit comet.”
The students, who took two trips in the plane, tested power requirements, gear wobble and how air will be distributed in the vials — and everything worked better in zero gravity.
Along with the experiment, the students are sending personalized Lego minifigures, so each will have a minifigure that went to space.
The students said they’re confident in their work, but still plenty nervous because there’s no way to fix anything that goes wrong once their experiment is in space.
“When we get it back, we analyze the data and see if we got any results,” McCormick said. “I’m hopeful.”