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18/06/2010 8:35
15/6/10
After another (painfully) early start, we were met by the tantalising smell of our second cooked breakfast of the week, and by 8.30 were ready for our briefing from Gordon about the day’s activities. Immediately following that - in the same, sub-tropical lecture theatre - our first talk was given by Derek Long, with a focus on mission planning and the challenges faced by space agencies when controlling equipment over vast distances. For the duration of the talk, we learned about various robotic missions - past, present and future - and of the numerous pitfalls involved in controlling a rover on Mars.
To emphasise the challenging nature of the TAP (Tactical Activity Planner) team’s work, we were then taken to the computer lab of the Livingstone Tower and presented with a rover simulation. Each day the TAP team is required to transmit hundreds or even thousands of commands in advance to account for connection lag, which makes live control of the rovers impossible. Their work is made harder still by the small time frame within which the rover can be contacted due to planetary movements and solar alignment. As if this wasn’t challenging enough, the rovers are limited to radiation hardened and energy efficient processors, with current speeds only just reaching a measly 100Mhz. Within our simulation we were required to plan the rover’s journey on alien terrain, taking into account various scientific objectives and power/memory constraints, which proved to be rather frustrating!
After lunch, we met the Dean of Sciences at Strathclyde Uni, Professor Iain Hunter, and were given a brief history of time and space through the eyes of a microbiologist, as well as a heads-up on current space missions - a Soyuz spacecraft is set to launch at midnight tonight! After escaping the ever sweltering heat of the lecture hall (someone open a window!!!), we were escorted to an electronics room where we were given the oh-so-simple task of constructing a heart rate monitor. We quickly discovered that very few people had attempted anything like it before, but after two hours of determined guesswork, most people were met with the comforting knowledge that they still had a pulse.
Following some more time to work on our Big Project and another dinner at Todd’s Diner, we made our way to the Student Union for a talk by the “Roboprof”, Professor Kevin Warwick. We were enlightened about current developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, such as cyborgs, robots with brains of rats and people with robotic limbs and implants. The most fascinating of all the cyborgs was the Professor himself, who implanted a silicon chip into his arm and connected to his own nervous system. This allowed him to perform many incredible feats as a result of technological extensions, such as the ability to control a robot hand on the other side of the world simply by moving his own hand. Interest was clearly high, and this was emphasised by the barrage of questions that the students fired at Roboprof for the next 3 hours. ( http://www.kevinwarwick.com/ )
This was swiftly followed by an epic pool tournament, with friendly jeers and encouragements (and balls) flying around the room. Many of us were horrifically bad - often resulting in hilarity - but we all had a great time all the same. A tense final between the best two teams proved a satisfying conclusion to the event and the day. Roll on open mic night!
James and Matthew. 18/06/2010 8:34
As we woke up on the morning of our third day at space school, there was the usual feeling of tiredness but also an air of excitement as we knew that we were bound for a fun packed day. It all kicked off with an early morning lecture with Professor Graham Ault from the institute of energy and the environment who informed us on the university’s fantastic trip to Gambia. The professor gave us a first- hand insight into “The Gambia Project”, an annual trip which involves student from the university visiting and helping areas of the Gambia. The main focus of the event is to utilize the areas rich supply of intense solar energy by setting up a series of solar panels which will provide electricity to remote areas of the region which previously had none. This in turn will help local communities immensely as it will offer social, economic, environmental and even educational benefits, so the cause of the project is very important to the people of the Gambia. For our team this level of generosity inspired us to realize that becoming an engineer is more than just an average day job but a tool that enables us to help people’s lives.
Later on in the day we returned back to the microbiology lab we worked in on Monday. It was exciting to see the varied amount of bacteria we each had growing on our infested skin, as it’s not something you see every day! We went back into our pairs and began conducting experiments we each had been assigned. Once we had our own bacteria onto the slides, we look under the microscope to examine what bacteria we had, we were shocked to see the outcome. We were able to see the millions of microbes that we each had on our bodies.
Over the past few days we were all working on set projects that were assigned to each group, for our group we were told to design a website for the Scottish Space School Alumni Association. For us, we thought long and hard about how to do this and we were fortunate enough that a team member in our group was able to actually create the website for us giving us the advantage over the other team that we were against. We would be presenting these in front of three main judges and the rest of the groups. After planning out the basic structure of the website, we quickly got to work on creating it into a website. This was a challenging experience but was also one we couldn’t deny as being fun!
After dinner we attended an “Evening with NASA” where Nicholas Patrick, Heather Paul and Donald Williams attended. During the event Heather, who is NASA’s project manager for space station EVA tools informed us of the complex nature of the space suit and how space exploration would not be possible without a suitable life support. After Heather’s fantastic lecture, NASA astronaut Nicholas Patrick enlightened us about his most recent mission, STS 130 which took place between February 8th-21st, 2010. This lecture again was unbelievably amazing as the man who was standing in front of us had experienced the thrill of space flight, an experience which we can only dream about at the moment. However the lecture was also very inspiring as Nicholas himself was a graduate of engineering so therefore this encourages us to look further into also studying the field. Nicholas also informed us that during his flight he participated in three EVA’s (spacewalks) which was mind boggling enough without telling us that at a point he had no hands on the vehicle, so essentially he himself was a satellite of earth.
Following this immense experience we travelled to the student union to watch various talented members of the space school take part in open mic night. The evening was a tremendous success so we would like to take this moment to congratulate all that took part in the night’s proceedings.
By Christopher Doyle and Richard Campbell
18/06/2010 8:32
Sunday
After settling into our flats, Sunday night was our chance to get to know our team members; dinner was a bit quiet but the quiz soon had us chatting. We surprised ourselves with the sport round but our musical knowledge was not as great as we had hoped for.
Monday
Unsure about what to expect on our first morning of Space School, everyone headed over to the department of Mechanical Engineering for a lecture by Colin McInnes. Throughout the session we discussed the UK Space Industry and how potential jobs available are increasing in number. We also discussed methods of propulsion including solar sail, nuclear-thermal, solar-electric and chemical rocket propulsion. Our main project for today was designing, constructing and eventually launching a rocket next to Loch Lomond at night. So the introduction to rocket propulsion encouraged our minds to start ticking and to come up with fantastic design ideas. We left the lecture inspired.
After the lecture, we split into our teams in the assembly hall and were briefed about the rocket project. With the materials infront of us, team Rokot (appropriate name for the task!) split into two groups: construction and design. Amber amazed us with her astounding art skills as she skilfully created the teams idea of showing the inside of the rocket on the outside. Throughout the session we discussed problems such as design flaws and how to construct the rocket causing as little damage as possible. We worked as a team; sharing opinions, motivating one another and completely the task to the best of our ability. Some parts were particularly demanding like trying to get all the peices accurately in place before the glue dried! (A seemingly impossible task at the time).
We took a break from the rocket building and visited the microbiology labs, where we discussed problems about the transfer of bacteria from planet to planet and how the size of bacteria makes prevention of contamination even more difficult. We tested for different types of bacteria on our own skin using swabs and will return on Wednesday to discover if the bacteria is gram positive or gram negative (hopefully nothing too nasty will be found!) We also looked at the effectiveness of disinfectants; we will find out those results on Wednesday too.
After another session of rocket preparation, our masterpeice was finished. We were all pretty proud of how our rocket had turned out but worried about whether it would survive the bus journey out to Loch Lomond. Also in this session, we were shown how to make origami planes -which could survive mach 7 when it was only estimated at mach 3- we tried to keep up, but the guy had ninja fingers and was far too fast for us.
THE LAUNCH: It was a beautiful evening out at Loch Lomond, and the promise of a good rocket launch was apparent. We had a fair wait until our rocket was to take to the skies and at the last minute disaster struck... the guidance straw had fallen off our rocket. But all was rescued as glue and masking tape was on hand. All the other teams rockets certainly looked impressive and we worried whether ours would fail to take off ... or explode... we came up with many disasterious scenarios of what may happen. The team elected Amber to launch the rocket and we were all pleased when it reached 240ft plus landed really close to were it was launched. Nicholas Patrick photographed the event and we can't wait to see his pictures on Wednesday night. The launch was very impressive and we were all very proud. It was an awesome end to an awesome first day at space school.
Megan and Naomi |
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