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Article Terriers satellite to BU: "Do you read me? Over."By Hope Green After years of delay, Boston University's terriers satellite appears close to a launch date. According to Supriya Chakrabarti, chief scientist for the mission and director of BU's Center for Space Physics, April 18 is the date NASA has tentatively scheduled for liftoff. An L-1011 Stargazer aircraft carrying a Pegasus rocket will depart the Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, Calif., at approximately 9 p.m. Pacific time (midnight in Boston), and one hour later, the plane will drop the rocket, which will then launch terriers into a polar orbit at an altitude of about 340 miles. The satellite will circle Earth every 96 minutes, passing directly over BU twice a day and transmitting data to a radio dish mounted atop the Photonics Building. Scientists will use the information to create a three-dimensional map of the ionosphere, the atmosphere's upper layer, and to help predict conditions known as space weather -- which include the massive radiation storms that can damage communications satellites, interfere with power grids on Earth, and pose a threat to astronauts working outside their spacecraft. More than 60 undergraduate and graduate BU students have been involved in the science, theory, design, instrument development, and testing of terriers since the project began in 1994. NASA has set and then canceled other launch dates within the past year, but according to Chakrabarti, a CAS professor of astronomy, this time the agency is offering more encouraging signals. Moreover, for the first time terriers was actually packed up and delivered from a University laboratory to the air base, where a group of BU researchers arrived last month. Except for the project's principal investigator, CAS Assistant Research Professor Daniel Cotton, they will remain at the site conducting tests on the satellite until it leaves the ground. terriers, besides being the University's mascot, stands for Tomographic Experiment Using Radiative Recombinative Ionospheric EUV and Radio Sources. The project is part of NASA's Student Explorer Demonstration Initiative, which aims to make orbital science accessible to students and to develop methods of exploring space more cheaply and efficiently. The terriers project, including the launch, has cost NASA approximately $10 million. After the launch, 10 students will work in shifts twice a day in a CAS fourth-floor room that serves as mission control headquarters. They will monitor the satellite's power level and collect data as the craft passes overhead at approximately 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. The undergraduates, primarily astronomy and physics majors, have been training for the mission using a simulator device. Chakrabarti says they perform "like seasoned professionals." "There are computer programs that take data from the spacecraft and show it to us in patterns," explains Daniel Hoak (CAS'02). "We've been told what looks good and bad aboard the spacecraft, and what to do if there's a problem." Always available to answer their questions will be Janine Lyn (CAS'96), the mission commander and a BU assistant programmer analyst.
Factoring into the delays, Chakrabarti says, are technical problems with the launcher and competition from NASA's more expensive projects. With good weather, however, he thinks chances are good for a launch this spring. BU is one of three schools NASA selected to build and launch a small satellite. The University of Colorado sent up its craft in February 1998, and the University of New Hampshire's mission is slated for 2001. terriers will give BU students an unusual opportunity for hands-on learning that most institutions do not offer, Hoak and other students say. And according to Chakrabarti, it has spawned numerous satellite projects for the University. "The second-best thing to being an astronaut," he says, "is putting something up there you have built with your own hands, collecting data nobody in the world ever has, and trying to find answers to questions nobody has been able to answer before."
Visit the terriers Web site at www.bu.edu/satellite/. |
