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Utilizing three major themes, or perhaps operational tasks, used by remote sensing professionals in the Geosciences (i.e. Acquire, Analyze, and Apply), the A3Sat Project will introduce pre-college students to the importance and applications of the Geosciences, specifically environmental ground-validation protocols, as well as engineering and technology components generally not found in the pre-college community. The data and/or imagery provides a wide range of innovative and transformative opportunities to gain experience, develop proficiencies, and explore career pathways that are not readily available to the pre-college community thus broadening participation in STEM career pathways.
The A3Sat project will allow students to build an active model mirroring many aspects of an authentic CubeSat design engineers use for launch into space. A large number of sensors that will be onboard A3Sat come from an integrated board known as the Enviro+. The data from all of these sensors are both recorded and time stamped in a log file as well as displayed as an overlay in both the visible and infrared camera views.
CubeSats are playing an ever-increasing role in the Aerospace community from observing the Earth system to providing guidance for satellite missions to Mars and the Moon. These types of authentic experiences can no longer wait to be explored only at the college or university level, they must begin in the pre-college community. This project will result in broadening participation and creating diversity within these communities due to the interdisciplinary nature and requirements of such an integrated project.
John Moore
Executive Director
Welcome to A3Sat! CubeSats have established a unique place in the aerospace community. There are numerous schools and universities that have built, and launched, CubeSat projects into space. A3Sat was designed to broaden participation, especially to precollege students, to prepare and inspire them in STEM careers, and alert them to the fact that these STEM careers are available to them! My Co-presenters, Max Friedman and Sriram Elango, are both High School students. Working with me on the A3Sat vision, they completely designed and build the working model (in fact they produced this video too). Skills included modeling for 3D printing, creating code for the sensors on the Raspberry Pi, and software for the development of our "ground station" and more. This "launch experience" utilizes a drone, however we have experimented with the NASA Aerokats Project, and tethered balloons. The GLOBE Program scientific protocols, especially the GLOBE Observer app, will be used to conduct ground observations which are sent to NASA. A3Sat will provides other Geoscience data and imagery that will be analyzed and applied to student studies, thus completing the Acquire-Analyze-Apply cycle. Participating in investigations such as this promotes data literacy proficiencies which add to their workforce readiness preparation. We "visualize" the NexGen Earth SySTEM professionals using this approach and tools investigating our planet through and solving complex global issues through the eyes of Geoscientists.
Mike Vargas
Physics Teacher
Hi John,
This is an awesome project. I wanted to ask you some questions about getting teachers involved with the program. What kind of PD is involved to get this program going at a school ?
Also just out of curiosity what is the highest launch you guys have done so far?
Many Thanks
Mike
John Moore
Executive Director
Hi Mike,
For the ground portions, PD will include introduction to the GLOBE Program, offer GLOBE Teacher Certification, and more specifically introduce teachers to the GLOBE Observer app. The project is designed to offer teachers a wide range of opportunities. For instance one option would be to receive the A3Sat assembled. The next option can be to build the Cube following an instruction manual (that is currently being written). Yet another option, a more advance application, is to change sensors, write new coding for a specific sensor operation. We made these decisions so that the broadest audience, any grade level can meet their needs. Beyond the actual Cube, we will probably need to do some work with flying a drone, or the NASA Kite, or tethered balloon. Again, we planned/designed options that can be decided by the teacher based on availability and costs. One of our main goals was to design and provide the most technically accurate model for the lowest price point as to not exclude anyone, thus the options for PD address level of background knowledge/experience, and costs. We are planning on offering perhaps webinars where both Max and Sriram can host and walk folks through some of these areas. In addition to their other skills, they both happen to be great instructors!
Highest launch? Our drone is capable of reaching higher altitudes, but we flew it to up to about 350 ft. investigating how high we would have to fly to get an areas shot of 30mx30m (a Landsat Pixel) which turns out to be approximately 225 ft. to in order to do pixel image analysis. Working on other ideas too that may require higher flights.
Betsy Stefany
Hi, John,
Thanks for the view of how you are working with the drones with sensors. I totally agree with your view,
These types of authentic experiences can no longer wait to be explored only at the college or university level, they must begin in the pre-college community.
Also would like to connect the current NASA/AREN project experiences in some way....ideally discussing online.
I have had high school level students involved with the analysis of the sensor data and documenting low level winds and building stresses as we work with the NASA/AREN Aeropod. (see the video) In the past we have collaborated with colleges launching weather balloons, however in our location retrieving data is problematic.
Your approach to teachers' levels are similar to ours. How are their students encouraged to use the data as personal project extensions? Do they receive aid to ground proof/truth with sites that the cubes covered on Earth?....Do teachers evolve their project for future year extensions from local data? Do they construct other projects in further years’ courses?
Thanks for your perspective...
Betsy Stefany
Thomas Smith
Professor
Hi John,
I am so impressed with your co-presenters! You mention broadening participation as a desired outcome of A3SAT; are there other learning outcomes that you are measuring? And, like Mike, I am interested in how you are thinking about scale.
Tom
John Moore
Executive Director
Hi Tom,
We are confident that this will be a powerful environmental/geoscience and engineering tool. I have observed the high levels of collaboration that were developed between Max and Sriram using their personal expertise and knowledge (who previously never met). Due to the disciplinary nature involving all aspects of the total project, numerous outcomes can/will be investigated. I believe that there will be numerous outcomes to study in any portion of the S and T and E and M, thus making it a true STEM project.
We have several potential scaling opportunities. (1) GLOBE Mission Earth has a large network in place, (2) the GLOBE Program is international in nature, and Dr. Kang will be implementing at the US Naval Academy, and we also have Prof Bob Twiggs (Co-Inventor of CubeSats) and his network. In addition, the US Department of Education sponsored a program "CTE Mission CubeSat" on a national level that was a fantastic introduction to the educational power of CubeSats (especially the CTE applications) to the nation.
Thomas Smith
Rebecca Vieyra
Doctoral Student
John,
I'm curious to know what you use to "seed" interest for students to find questions and problems to explore using the CubeSat, and how those questions or problems relate to student learning. It has lots of capabilities related to visualization and environmental data collection, so I'm curious to know how the activities you are working on with your students address particular knowledge and skill sets. Based on the look of things, you could be going for programming/coding skills, engineering/design skills, data science, collaboration skills, or perhaps more broad inquiry of some form. I also know you mentioned career awareness. What specific outcomes are you hoping for, and how are you measuring them?
Maxwell Friedman
High School Student Intern
Speaking as someone who is still in school, I can tell you that generalized classes tend to not do enough to help students find their specific passions, especially within STEM. All encompassing projects such as this, which bring together aspects of coding, engineering, data science, environmental sciences, and electronics help to reach out to more students and help them to find areas of STEM that they enjoy, or maybe just rule out the ones that they don't. Like you said, it will also help students with collaboration skills, as they work to fulfill these jobs withing the project. We hope that teachers will take our kit and model their teams with jobs based on these areas of learning, so that students can learn more about that subject and how to cooperate with other areas of study. Ultimately these groups would work together to use the data they collect to form their own conclusions. Short-term, we want to measure our success in this objective with surveys and feedback from our partner schools that receive the first edition prototype kit. This feedback would hopefully continue as we grow and we can use it to adjust and improve our kit and lessons as best as we can.
John Moore
Rebecca Vieyra
Doctoral Student
Thank you, Maxwell! Perhaps more specifically, from your perspective, what have you learned? I'd love to hear your self-assessment!
Maxwell Friedman
High School Student Intern
From a young age I have been teaching myself about coding, 3D modeling, 3D printing, and electronics. Because of that, there wasn't a lot that I had to learn from the ground up. That being said, there are many components that I have never worked with before and tasks that I had never before done successfully. The best example of this is the WIFI communication that we are integrating into the kit. While this is something I have tried in the past, I have usually given up after repeated failures. However, this project gave me a chance to work on it with a greater sense of purpose and motivation until I got it right. I am proud to say that we are almost done coding that system and I am more successful than I have ever been with it. Other tasks actually correlated with lessons I was learning in school at the exact same time. Because the kit has two cameras and the Raspberry Pi only has a single port, you need an adapter. This circuit that allows you to connect two cameras is known as a multiplexer and was the lesson in my engineering class the same week I was adding it to the kit. Being able to utilize what I was learning in school to solve problems in a real engineering environment, taught me more about how to apply what I learn and how to break systems down to their most basic elements. While I know that not everyone goes to a school that teaches them about electronics and multiplexers, I am sure that most students would be able to find connections between what they are learning and what they would be doing with our kit.
Sara Mierzwiak
Hi John, I so love this stuff you guys do! It's so cool. I'm curious to know: what ages are the youngest students you've gotten involved? And how has COVID impacted your work? Thanks! Sara
John Moore
Executive Director
Hi Sarah,
So far it's just Max (High School Senior), and Sriram (High School Sophomore) This summer a HS Intern at the US Naval Academy will pilot the assembly. Shortly, we will be ordering hardware to assemble 8-10 "kits" which we hope to pilot with a couple of GME teachers in the Fall. The students worked in our Innovation Lab using COVID precautions. Max worked by himself for many months in the beginning of the project, so it wasn't a large issue.
Michael Kaspar
Sara Mierzwiak
Well that's good to hear!
Mike Vargas
Physics Teacher
Tip of the hat to you Max. I am so impressed by your project and the hard work you put in on this. I am wondering - do your fellow students know you are working on this? What do other kids say about this project once they see it?
John Moore
Maxwell Friedman
High School Student Intern
Thank you so much! Most of my classmates are familiar with my project as I actually started working on it at school. I go to a technical high school and study electronic engineering. My teacher at the time arranged for me to work on this project with Mr. Moore and some of my early work was done in the classroom. Most of my classmates in engineering find the project interesting and will sometimes ask me questions about it. However, it is usually the parents who are most amazed. I would like to think that they are blown away by the educational implication of this kit, but it is probably more that they can't believe it was built by a high school student.
Betsy Stefany
Maxwell,
Thanks for writing about your role and also how people feel about our work within the project. I've often had a high school student as an "intern" and more recently been able to connect them with course credit through NH's Extended Learning Opportunity (ELO's) but transferring their work to college course credit is a huge leap.
I've been working with first and second year college students this year and what has helped during Covid is finding and joining with them in MOOCs which give some accreditation and were online. Also we immediately added the students with interest to industry conferences which went virtual and free.
Have you been in CTE courses? IS there any overlapping with their topics and the kit development?
It is very important that we all hear your "voice" and impressions beyond your lucky high school connected parents!
Thank you for what you share,
Betsy Stefany
Maxwell Friedman
High School Student Intern
Because I go to a technical high school, between a quarter and a half of my day is spent in engineering depending on my schedule for the semester. Most of my courses for engineering are considered CTE courses and are usually accredited by local colleges. During senior year, we spend the year on a senior project of our choice. This allows us to go in depth into solving problems either at school or at a business during a normal year. Overall, what I have learned in engineer directly went into this project and is the reason I have it in the first place
Michael Kaspar
Betsy Stefany
Thank you for this thorough view! What are you "called" as you progress in this system? I see your title here as a High School Student Intern...so just checking if that is a state accepted or a project title. We have a college "extern" who will post on our video. Your post is a huge help to others to structure their posts and think about the value (huge) to those of us who develop the projects and want them to both be sustainable AND also learn as we build and flex to the opportunities around us.
Thanks again...
Adam Cezar
Very interesting this video.
John Moore
Executive Director
Adam, thanks for taking the the time to watch and we're glad you found it interesting!
John Moore
Executive Director
A question to consider is "What is the impact of the national Science agenda on Science Education?" A3Sat is a project designed with the intention to bridge that gap.
People interested in the potential role of working with students to build CubeSats may wish to check out the Weiss School (https://www.weissschool.org/academics/weisssat-...) and read about their success as Middle School students. It was a vision of Kevin Simmons and myself as Einstein fellows at the NSF that while CubeSats were just emerging about 10years ago, that CubeSats would play a unique role in K12 STEM education. Working on CubeSat projects has proven to build team work working on long-term projects. A3Sat was designed to give students a similar experience with reduced costs (granted without the launch experience) to prepare and inspire the next generation aerospace and/or earth scientists.
You may also wish to review "CTE Mission CubeSat" (www.ctemissioncubesat.com/) conducted by the US Department of Education during the 2020-21 school year. This represents a great introduce to students of all ages. The program identifies the close relationships to Career Technical Education (CTE), building skill proficiencies.
Margaret Baguio
What is the approximate cost for a group of high school students?
John Moore
Executive Director
Hi Margaret,
We are finalizing that information now. However, it appears that the cost of building the A3Sat, as we have it configured, will be approximately $250. Note that the drone is not included in that price.
Margaret Baguio
Thank you! This may be a good project for our high school interns.
John Moore
Executive Director
Just moments ago (1:34 pm ET- 5/18/21) a ULA rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral. It is carrying 2 SBIRS GEO Flight Satellites for the US Space Force. With the tremendous increase in satellites, supply missions to the ISS, not to mention the future launches to both the Moon and Mars, it seems that the domain of space is becoming a more robust industry and an important part of the decision/policy making in society. Is education keeping up the future demand? Will students even be presented with these career pathways? A3Sat addresses the S and T and E and M.
Betsy Stefany
I just received this post..and have yet to receive Maxwell's from 3 PM or Sriam's 7:30. I hope we can find a further discussion that will link us into discussion. Solar panels are a fine addition, Maxwell. Too much has been pushed out by industry without visual support for comparison data between sites. Please look at that as customers in rural areas are not finding their "handle" and worry about the deal. Try light/temp loggers on the CubeSat...we sent them up on weather balloons. The photo issue causes dizzy views...more on this is on Bob Riddle's response from his use. Sriam, the software connection to personal data comes through personal use. The conference and webinars by Dept of Energy, Better Buildings...are ones you may not receive but tie to industry through use of data as direct measurement. Check their info out...and ...You should all be excited that we are connecting!
Maxwell Friedman
High School Student Intern
As this is the last day for comments, I thought it would be important to include an update of the progress we have made since the video. Since recording the video, we have decided to add solar panels to the design. This not only adds to the realism, but it promotes sustainable engineering and adds battery life. Lucky for us, doing this does not add to the overall number of circuits as the power distribution board is capable of accepting an input from solar panels, albeit not as efficiently as a circuit designed for that purpose. These solar cells will be attached to the top of the CubeSat with a new version of the top plate. Along with this progress, we have continued to work on the ground station code and have successfully created a system of two way communication, as well as photo transmission. We are very happy with the progress that we have made and look forward to testing our new design as well as the fully integrated communication that we are currently working on.
Sriram Elango
High School Student Intern
Hello everyone! I wanted to further convey that the skills I have obtained from this project are plentiful and have additionally enabled me to utilize my background in programming to build an entire ground station software platform that communicates with cube satellites, which is unheard of for most high school students! Rather than going through course work, this project allowed me to creatively use my knowledge and apply it, consolidating the skills needed in my mind and allowing my creative side to intertwine with my analytical and scientific side. It further introduced me to new concepts such as the electrical engineering and the circuitry aspect of satellites, broadening my knowledge past the software development domain. As it has improved both my technical knowledge as well as improved my skills in STEM as a whole, I believe this project will truly aid other students my age who are looking for harder and more fun challenges!