Hartselle High teams compete in designing NASA payload
For the Enquirer
Seniors in the engineering program at Hartselle High School are gearing up for an annual competition where they will design a scientific payload for NASA officials to review.
Engineering teacher Kim Pittman said there are 27 seniors in the program this year and three teams will design a payload to be carried by a theoretical spacecraft. The design will be presented to NASA and college officials at the University of Alabama at Huntsville on Dec. 6 for the InSPIRESS competition. Pittman said the seniors will also be graded on the project.
“NASA has the overall project mission, UAH is designing vehicles for the mission, and then our students are designing payloads to go on the vehicles,” Pittman said.
InSPIRESS, or Innovative System Project for the Increased Recruitment of Emerging STEM, is a competitive outreach project in which high school students develop and design a scientific payload to be accommodated on a spacecraft that is designed by undergraduate students in the UAH Integrated Product Team project.
The concept this year is to design a payload for a NASA mission to the Saturn moon, Titan.
“They will make a model and our teams most often print a 3D model,” Pittman said. “So, someone will design it on CAD (software) and when they print the model out, that’s what they’ll present (at UAH).” Part of the project is holding each teammate accountable, and the students do that by meeting every week and discussing everyone’s work.
“They basically have to grade each other on the team progress reports and we give them grades for that,” said engineering instructor Amber Roy. “They’ve identified an issue, and now their project leads have to go and try to deal with that issue, just like it is in a real industry.” Three teams from the Hartselle engineering program are competing in the competition: Team Theia, Team Kraken, and Team Chronus.
Team leaders for Team Chronus are Project Manager Kaydence Chandler and Chief Engineer Kynan Hogan.
Since August, the students have spent time researching Titan’s atmosphere and are investigating how the payload will function once it detaches from its spacecraft.
“The big one for us was the possibility for life being on Titan,” Hogan said. “It has these subsurface oceans and it is really cold up there, so they have these thick layers of ice, and then beneath them is still liquid methane. So, it is believed there may be microorganisms living on Titan already and that’s our goal is to find that out.” Chandler said their design plan is to detach their payload from the spacecraft and have it land on the moon’s Kraken Mare, which is a large sea of liquid methane gas. Students from UAH will design the spacecraft and have come to Hartselle High once already to discuss team progress reports with the seniors.
Students also must create social media apps for their teams where they must pro-vide updates on the progress of their payloads.
“Typically (our videos) fluctuate anywhere between 10 seconds and I believe our longest was 42 seconds and it introduced the entire team, but they usually last around 25 seconds,” said Matthew Wallace, a member of the community outreach group. “Quick-burst information helps a lot because it keeps people tuned into it because it’s not too long where they would lose interest.” All three teams have profiles on either YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, and Team Theia has a podcast on Spotify.
Pittman said if the teams win the competition at UAH, two students will be selected to travel to Washington, D.C., and present their project ideas to NASA’s Planetary Science Division.
