A programme at the Kennedy Space Centre challenged a group of Irish students to build and launch a rocket, writes Andrew Read.
This weekend, 12 Irish university students return from a six-week stint at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. There, they built a payload of weather instruments and sent it into the stratosphere and launched a rocket from Cape Canaveral, a first for an education group from any country.
The summer school, called Discover Science, is a FÁS initiative developed in conjunction with the Kennedy Space Centre and the Florida Space Institute. It is the brainchild of Dublin-born Tony Gannon, education manager at the Kennedy Space Centre.
Having worked at KSC for 20 years, he was keen to do something for Ireland. The success of space seminars he organised in the Republic encouraged him to do more.
"How do you excite students in the classroom?" he asks. "You get them taught by the people in charge of the space station and the guys that fly the space shuttle."
He made the case for bringing students to Florida, and in July six men and six women arrived, having been picked by NASA from those nominated by their universities.
In Florida, the students have been engaged in a range of classroom and laboratory work. Julie Behan from Shanagolden, Co Limerick, a first year PhD student at the University of Limerick, said it was fantastic to see the technology first hand. She was particularly intrigued to see robotics used to grow tomatoes, part of NASA's effort to produce food in space.
"It opened my eyes to a huge range of applications. I'd never thought of robotics for growing a plant," she says. The technology was surprisingly similar to that used in her own work on robotic devices for the disabled and elderly. "The main difference is that NASA has to work to much higher specifications."
One of the students' main activities was building the payload of weather instrumentation that they sent to an altitude of 30,000 metres on a balloon. The students put together temperature and humidity sensors, Global Position Satellite receivers and the telemetry to relay the data back to a ground station, explains Ray Carroll, a first year MSc student in telecommunications at the Waterford Institute of Technology.
The main challenge was building the equipment to withstand the conditions at extreme altitudes. Much of the classroom time focused on propulsion, flight dynamics, and rocket guidance systems, with their own rocket as the real world example. It was very mathematical, says Carroll. According to Behan it was "exciting and it was great to see that stuff we learned at school and university has very real applications. You see huge equations really working."
For his part, Gannon was "delighted" with the way the course had gone. "It is very intimidating working with students this good," he says. "We're offering them a meal, exciting their palettes. They'll become exceptional men and women as a result of the experiences we're able to give them."
The other students on the programme included: Sarah Brady, from Co Offaly, Lisa Burke, Co Louth, Elizabeth Deasy, Co Cork, Ben Flood, Limerick, Emily McLoughlin, Co Cork, Cillian O'Driscoll, Cork, Darragh Walsh, Co Dublin, Fergal Ward, Co Louth, and Phil Ward and Elaine Winston, both from Dublin. Students interested in the 2004 programme can register at www.discoverscience.ie.