A team of eight Dodson High School students currently engaged in the NASA Tech Rise challenge shared their project concept with Rotary on April 20, a proposal for a rocket powered lander that will fly for approximately two minutes at an altitude of 80 feet over a California test field designed to look at the moon’s surface.

Will any of these move on to become part of the space program as adults?  There’s no guarantee but they have acquired some hands-on skills that they wouldn’t have known without their involvement in this NSAS project, explained science teacher Casey Tolar.

Asked what some of those take-away skills are, students down the line answered:  soldering, understanding of wiring diagrams, how to analyze situations and fix problems, reaching out to people to teach skills, connectivity,  ability to apply various electronic skills, deeper and broader understanding and realizing that the only real way to learn is to do it yourself.

Dodson’s is one of only 60 teams nationwide taking part in this challenge (and is the only one in Louisiana).  They are not flying alone, as it were.  They received $1500 to build the experiment, a flight box in which to build it, a spot to test their experiment on a NASA sponsored flight, and the team receives technical support through a Zoom meeting each Friday with NASA mentor Ani Williams.

The completed project will have to be delivered by May 17.  The NASA test will follow in August in Mojave, CA.

Rotarians were surprised to find that the skill set displayed by the DHS students belied their young ages.  All of the participants are sophomores, with the exception of one junior.  They still have plenty of time of learn and grow through their secondary educational journey.

One of the students, Charlie Buckley, gave an overview of DHS’s NASA Tech Rise project for the Rotary members.  Her report follows:

“Good Afternoon,

“We would like to take a short moment to tell you about the process proceeding the coding and mock-up mounting — and a little about the opportunities this challenge has presented all of us before we explain the components that go into the flight box, what they do, and how we are going to use them in our experiment going forward.

“First, we had to create a proposal submission which was more or less allowing us to visualize how we were going to build it, what we were going to accomplish using this experiment, and most importantly, why we wanted to build and code a payload for a rocket-powered lander. The main reason is knowledge: it’s an essential part of society as a whole, from Aristarchus to Yuri Gagarin, the first man to reach the stars, The Mercury 7, the International Space Station, and many other suborbital and orbital missions that NASA has used its resources to advance human creativity and curiosity. 

“Some 360 humans have reached the stars since NASA was founded nearly 65 years ago. Our question is; who is going to be the next? Who will be the next person to reach beyond the stars, further and further into new horizons, and how can we guarantee the posterity of STEM? One thing we know for sure is that we are willing to have a hand in the progression of humanity’s

knowledge of the universe through these experiments that will inspire people years down the line.

“As you have heard, we all have shared some of our favorite things about this challenge, but perhaps less on the opportunities presented. This experiment has been proven to increase the likelihood of students pursuing a hobby or career involving STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) through the skills students develop over the course of 17 weeks working on choosing their own components, wiring, coding, and overall hands-on work. We are living proof of this. All students deserve to have as many choices as they can to ensure they enter a field of work or study that they enjoy and resonate with; and challenges like these are a great example of a program that works with students to enhance their academic prowess.

“Each component used in this flight box serves a purpose to achieve our goal of using imaging technology, like this Light Detection and Ranging sensor or LiDAR for short, to capture data on a lunar surface. By using topographic technology, object detection, data collection, and graphing technology. We believe that we will be able to accurately and thoroughly gather information about the testing site and, therefore, any (simulated) lunar or planetary surface. 

“This flight box is essentially a web of interconnecting code, it operates based upon the input and data it obtains from other components, and to do this it has to have a ‘brain’ of sorts, not an actual brain mind you, but a mechanical one. The Payload Interface Board and the Metro M4 occupy this niche. The M4 is the brain inside of the flight box, telling the other components what to do and the frequency of their actions, then relays that to the PIB which can open a kind of channel of communication between the two.

“All other components, save the PIB and Metro M4, connect to the Metro microchip and collect data from their code runs. The GPS tracks the overall movement of the rocket as it follows a set course on the Lunar Surface Testing Field in Mojave, California. The SPI SMT SD Card is used to contain all the data from each data run to analyze the productivity of the network, topographical terrain of the lunar surface and to fix any errors in the coding or wiring. The IMU, GPS, and LiDAR all work together as a kind of semi network inside a bigger web of connection. 

“The GPS detects where the rocket is going and the IMU is collecting data concerning the force and acceleration in which the rocket is exerting. The LiDAR is the main driving point behind the entire experiment as it is the main device we use to achieve our goal of topographic lunar imaging; the LiDAR detects the range, concavity, and convection of the surface, as well as the frequency in which they occur.

“All in all, we believe that this challenge will bring young minds closer to greatness as well as establish a strong foundation for people to improve their skills where they can in a field as versatile as STEM whilst helping humanity as a whole bring themselves one step closer to understanding our home in the universe.”