Section: Academics
Demosat Program: An out-of-this-world experience for students
Nov 7, 2007

Five students in Metro State's DemoSat program traveled to Cape Canaveral in August to watch a shuttle launch.

Watching a spacecraft lift off into the wild blue yonder is pretty much an out-of-this-world experience.

Five Metro State students got that opportunity in August when they traveled to Cape Canaveral to witness liftoff of Space Shuttle Endeavour. The students got the chance thanks to the College’s DemoSat, or demonstration satellite, program.

Sponsored by NASA and funded by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, gives students a hands-on approach to tackling scientific missions. Applying classroom theory and some old-fashioned curiosity, students in the workforce development program work with program advisor and Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Keith Norwood to select, develop and implement projects to satisfy mission requirements handed down by NASA.

Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Keith Norwood advises the DemoSat program at Metro State.

“Many of these missions are related to current challenges NASA is having with something they are working on,” says Norwood. “ …in a sense [they] need a fresh, outside perspective that can often lead to creative solutions.”

In its fifth year, the extracurricular program has yielded projects such as RoverSat, FieldSat, GPSSat, SolarSat and VideoSat.

Senior David Fifield was one of the five students to see the Endeavour launch and part of the DemoSat IV and V teams that looked to, among other things, measure the accelerations and rotations of a small satellite payload that was deployed to 100,000 feet above sea level by a weather balloon.

Fifield, who is majoring in both math and computer science, says he wrote the post-flight visualization software and also the software that was responsible for reading and recording information gathered by sensors on the DemoSat IV and V payloads. The later software also sent commands to take pictures while at maximum deployment and in the end, the team was able to create a real-time, three-dimensional representation of the mission.

The satellite payloads are tethered to a large weather balloon and flown to an altitude of 100,000 feet.

Norwood says that not every mission goes according to plan, but points out that students still learn valuable lessons despite the failures.

“All the schools have failed missions,” says Norwood. “It’s all part of the research and technical innovation that the students must work within to determine why a particular aspect of the mission failed.”

The DemoSat program is open to students in any discipline. Participants are asked to commit six months between January and August when they will select the missions they will address, develop and build their satellite payloads and applicable software, launch the project and then gather and prepare a final report of their findings. The final report, which showcases successes and interesting technologies, is often presented to NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The satellite payload is outfited with a camera to bring back images from the flight.

Norwood, who worked for NASA for eight years, points out that the real-world experience is critical to preparing the future generations that will frontier our continued space exploration. Citing the gap that will be created when the Baby Boomer generation exits the field, Norwood says, “It has to be our own kids who will rise to meet the challenge.”

For more information about the program, please contact Norwood at norwoori@mscd.edu or 303-556-2977. To review the DemoSat V mission, please visit www.bamsoftware.com/wiki/DemoSatV .