CUE Home >> Features >> Student Dust Counter—Counting All the Way to Pluto and Beyond

CUE 2006

Aerospace Engineering Sciences: Student Dust Counter—Counting All the Way to Pluto and Beyond

On Jan. 19, the New Horizons spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying the first student-created instrument ever to fly on a NASA planetary mission, the CU-Boulder Student Dust Counter.

The SDC will monitor the density of dust grains in space as New Horizons heads to Pluto and beyond. The dust grains are of high interest to researchers as they are the building blocks of planets.

Mark Lankton, a professional research assistant at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and one of the professionals who worked closely with the five CU-Boulder graduate students and 20 undergraduates who designed and built the instrument, says New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched.

"There was a huge rocket with this tiny spacecraft perched on top and a giant motor to get it going close to a million miles a day," he explains. "In less than a year it will get a boost from Jupiter, and go even faster."

Even at this speed, New Horizons will take 10 years to reach Pluto at the edge of our solar system.

Chelsey Bryant was a master's degree candidate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences when she began working on the project.

"Each of the graduate students was put in charge of a team of undergrads," says Bryant. "I was the head of fabrication and design of the detectors on the SDC. Space dust becomes embedded in the detector panel, producing a current that is used to measure the dust's mass."

The data collected by the SDC started streaming back to Earth on March 2. Dust already has been measured between Earth and Saturn, but from Jupiter on out, the measurements will all be new. "This dust has information coming from more ancient times than what reaches the Earth, and we need to go out and listen to what it has to say," Lankton says.

Principal investigator Mihaly Horanyi says the student team performed extremely well: "The level of performance you get out of students is proportional to the enormity of the task that you set them. If it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have flight hardware experience, students will perform better than some professional teams."

"Students had to design and build a robust instrument that had to work now and after launch, and deliver good science," says Lankton. "They had no option but to be successful, as this project had real world consequences if it didn't succeed."

Bryant found that responsibility exciting: "Now that I'm a professional research assistant at LASP, there are so many people all up the line aking the decisions. When I was working on my MS degree [earned in 2003], students were in charge of designing and building the instrument. Professionals guided us at every step, but graduate and undergraduate students decided some really important things," she says.

"It was so worthwhile—virtually all the students who worked on the project have gotten great jobs since or gone on to universities like Harvard," Bryant says. "It would be awesome for there to be financing for more students to have opportunities like this one."

For more information, visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/programs_missions/ present/off_site/sdc.html
Department web site: www.colorado.edu/aerospace