January 21, 2022
Astral Orbit WINS NASA TECHRISE COMPETITION, GOING TO SPACE
Marquette High School selected as a winner of the 2021-2022 NASA TechRise Competition. Their experiment will fly to space in early 2023.
Today, Marquette High School of Chesterfield, Missouri earned the title of 2021-2022 NASA TechRise Competition Winner for their experiment proposal "Lunar Regolith Simulant Behavior in Microgravity Environments: A NASA TechRise Proposal." With NASA's support, their proposed experiment will now be built and sent to space in 2023 aboard the UP Aerospace SpaceLoft rocket.
The mission will examine how simulated particles of free-floating lunar dust, commonly referred to as regolith, interact with each other and with commonly used spacecraft materials. Understanding regolith's properties is essential since their particles are tiny, sharp, electrostatic, and take a long time to settle, presenting challenges to lunar missions. Such problems include landing visibility, adhesion to space suits, pollution of habitats, and destruction of joints in moving parts. With the upcoming NASA Artemis missions going back to the moon, these issues are increasingly essential to investigate.
The Marquette team, more commonly referred to as "Astral Orbit," first found the competition through the NASA website. Quickly jumping on the opportunity, the team wrote three proposals to be submitted for review: regolith, flight computers, and polymerized adhesives. Senior Ben Cook, the lead writer for the regolith proposal, was ecstatic when he found out the experiment was going to space: "this is the most insane thing I've ever been a part of." Junior Alex Chen, the lead writer for the other two proposals and a secondary author of the regolith proposal, was equally excited: "Astral Orbit was founded as a high school group with the arguably over-ambitious goal to reach space. Now, we've partially accomplished that mission."
Over the next few months, Astral Orbit will design, build, and test their proposed experiment under the guidance of NASA engineers and scientists. "Most of the time when designing an experiment, a human is there to observe it. Making a fully autonomous design while also in zero gravity presents a very unique and difficult design challenge," said junior Rusty Willis, Astral Orbit's lead engineer. The project will have to be built from scratch under extremely tight mass and space constraints, while also adhering to an aggressively paced schedule. The team has indicated that it is "ready to go, and ready to prove what we can do!"
Visit the team’s website at: https://bit.ly/astralorbit. Follow and support the team on its journey: @realastralorbit on Twitter and Instagram! Questions? Contact realastralorbit@gmail.com.
Image credits: NASA