January 30, 2004 Student
Life
This feature, "Student Life," returns with a new
name, replacing "Student News." The intent, however,
is the same. "Student Life" brings readers the best
of student-produced journalism at Utah State University. Featured
items are written by students for The Utah Statesman,
the official student newspaper of Utah Sate University, or The
Hard News Café, the online publication from the
Department of Journalism and Communication. Both publications
are award winning and present the talents of Utah State's journalists-in-training.
This week's piece is from The Utah Statesman by writer
Tyler Riggs
Space Dynamics Lab contributes
to NASA, Navy technologies
From the The Utah
Statesman 01/26/04
 Some
of the things being developed at the Space Dynamics Lab in North
Logan are well ahead of their time.
One might say they're out of this world, or at least, will
be out of this world eventually.
Since it was founded in 1959, SDL has played a significant
role in advances in NASA and military technologies. More than
400 research payloads from SDL, ranging from rocket-borne sensors
to space shuttle experiments have found their way to outer space.
SDL brings millions of research dollars to Utah State University
every year and gives hundreds of students experience working
in aerospace-related fields, enabling them to get real-life
experience.
"I really encourage people that are still in college,
if you think you know what you want to do in life, take the
time, go out and experience it before you get put in a full-time
position," said project specialist Kevin Smith. "You
may get there and find out [the job] is not quite what you expected."
Smith found out what his job was going to be like by following
his own advice. He started working at SDL as a student and after
three years and graduation, he was hired on as a full-time employee.
.jpg) Smith
works with the Thermal and Optical Research (THOR) chamber that
is located in the Calibration and Optical Research Laboratory.
THOR is a large calibration facility that has a vacuum chamber
with cryogenic capabilities that are used to test large instruments
intended for space.
"It sounds really simple, but it gets really technical
when you get down to the nuts and bolts," Smith said about
THOR. "There's a lot to it."
The Volkswagen Beetle-sized chamber can be cooled with liquid
nitrogen to simulate space conditions where the temperature
can reach about 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Equipment
like satellites that are intended for space can be tested with
THOR to ensure they are operational when put to actual use.
"It's a lot easier to test it and say, oops, we screwed
up and then pull it out and fix the problem than it is to shoot
it up [to space] and say oops and be stuck," Smith said.
"When we shoot it up into space, we can be sure things
will happen correctly."
Before the THOR chamber came to SDL, it had been used for similar
testing purposes but also was used in the movies "Apollo
13" and "Aliens," said SDL public relations specialist
Trina Paskett. When SDL received the chamber, it had to have
somewhere to put the behemoth.
"It's a big tub to stick in your backyard," Smith
said. "You have all this piping and you have a lot of safety
issues when working with liquid nitrogen, you need to have space
to work."
A "Lada" veggies
While the things that are put into THOR are tested for performance
and reliability in the vacuum of space, the things that are
put into another SDL project called Lada do something a little
different: They grow.
Lada, named after the Russian Goddess of Spring, is a self-contained
growth chamber used to grow vegetables. One Lada module currently
resides at SDL, the other is on board the International Space
Station, Paskett said.
The project was engineered almost entirely by students, with
between 15 or 20 students working on the project said electrical
engineer Shane Topham. The students that worked on Lada came
from a number of different backgrounds including electrical
engineering, mechanical engineering, software engineering and
biology.
The only time someone other than a student worked on Lada,
Topham said, was on an earlier version that traveled on the
MIR space station: A full-time engineer was hired to supervise
the students.
Lada has been used to grow peas, tomatoes, radishes and mizuna
for the cosmonauts and astronauts aboard the International Space
Station. Paskett said the Lada technology could be instrumental
in building a permanent base on the Moon.
In constructing the Lada module, Paskett said, students have
been to Wal-Mart to buy parts for the low-cost technology.
The material that grows in Lada grows out of a Kitty Litter-type
clay, Topham said. There are plans to send a new root module
to the ISS in the next few months so that a new experiment can
be started.
Picture-perfect
Another technology developed at SDL was not intended for use
in outer space but rather for military reconnaissance. The lab
contributed to work on the U.S. Navy's Tactical Input Segment
Screener Processor Element (TIS-SPE). SDL developed hardware
and software helping to make date received from TIS-SPE and
the Shared Reconnaissance Pod (SHARP) that is mounted on the
belly of Navy aircraft.
The SHARP pods contain sophisticated hyperspectral cameras
that take large numbers of pictures of an area and download
them in real-time to a ground-based computer station, said program
manager and computer scientist Darin Partridge.
A hyperspectral camera, Partridge said, can see on many different
bands beyond the visual band that the human eye sees. The camera
currently being used can see 168 different bands.
Partridge explained the hyperspectral camera as being able
to see a camouflage net in a photo, clicking on it using the
computer and telling the computer that that is a camouflage
net. In the future, the computer will be able to identify all
portions of a photograph that contain those same signatures,
thus letting the user of the system know where all the camouflage
nets are.
"Is it possible that it'll get it wrong? Yeah, but I'll
tell you what, it gets it right a lot," Partridge said.
The pods that are mounted on Navy F-18, F-14 and P-3 aircraft
capture hundreds of pictures while flying 33,000 feet in the
air at 575 miles per hour.
"The faster and lower he flies, the less coverage you're
going to get," Partridge said. "The more higher and
slow you fly, you can take lots of happy pictures."
Partridge said the camera is smart enough, depending on the
altitude and velocity of the aircraft, to know how many pictures
it has to take before it swings around to get coverage that
it missed in the line of flight.
The technology SDL contributed to the project deals with the
compression and de-compression of the images.
During flight, the images are captured by the camera, compressed,
and instantly de-compressed and delivered to a computer station
aboard an aircraft carrier or on dry land. The technology allows
the military to do instant reconnaissance and decide whether
to attack an enemy target instantly.
"They used to do reconnaissance completely with real film,"
Partridge said. "They had to wait for the plane to land
then they would get the film and put it on these light tables."
Obviously, Partridge said, reconnaissance is much faster with
the new technology.
With the technology, using the navigation date supplied by
the aircraft, Partridge said, it is possible to tell distances
and dimensions of objects on the ground. Partridge, displaying
a fly over of San Francisco, said he is able to tell the height
of a tower on the Golden Gate Bridge and the distance between
two bases on the baseball field at 3Com Park - it was, in fact,
90 feet.
Getting the parts
With all the precise, intricate technology and material that
is needed to build everything SDL sends into space, there come
times when a unique part is needed for whatever is being built.
The call for a one-of-a-kind part is something that machine
shop supervisor Robert Low is ready to answer.
"We can just about machine anything they can draw,"
Low said.
The machine shop at SDL is not a production shop, but is made
to create unique parts whenever someone at SDL needs them for
their projects.
"It's set up where we can work with the designers and
the engineers, if they're in a hurry for a part, we can jump
right on it and get building it," Low said. "We can
give the designers and engineers a very quick turnaround."
Inside the door of the machine shop is a table littered with
miscellaneous examples of past work done in the shop. Items
on the table include a solid aluminum cube, a honeycomb-shaped
apparatus used on satellites and a three-dimensional human face
carved into an aluminum block.
Students welcome and wanted
Paskett said there are many jobs available for students at
SDL. The internship opportunities available are not limited
to engineering and other science-related fields, there are public
relations internships available as well. Paskett said she started
as an intern at SDL.
Paskett said when jobs and internships become available, they
are posted on the Internet at www.sdl.usu.edu.
Smith said the experience of interning at SDL was a good one
for him, and it can be the opportunity of a lifetime for a university
student.
Smith said, "We're mechanical, we're electrical, you'll
learn just basic aerospace technology as well as how it's applied
to everyday lives."
By Tyler Riggs, str@cc.usu.edu
Photos by John Zsiray
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