A partnership between NASA and the U.S. Naval Academy is offering students the chance to build a satellite called "MidSTAR-2" through a U.S. Department of Defense program that will carry four experiments into space in 2011 to look at different parts of Earth's atmosphere, gamma rays, and solar winds. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland are taking advantage of the opportunity to carry promising technologies into orbit for evaluation.
The NASA experiments that will fly on MidSTAR-2 are part of the Internal Research and Development Program at NASA Goddard. The program lets NASA send instruments into space without waiting for another mission. "This is a program where everyone wins," said Dan Powell, MidSTAR program manager at NASA Goddard. "Students get an opportunity to build and integrate a satellite bus and our scientists' instruments get a free ride."
One of the instruments taking that ride is the Remote Sensing of the Thermospheric Temperature instrument that will be used to take the temperature of Earth's thermosphere to determine how much it can slow low-altitude spacecraft. The thermosphere is Earth's outermost layer of atmosphere, located about 50 to 340 miles above the surface. Because of the thin air, scientists can't measure temperature directly, so they measure density of the air by seeing how much drag it puts on satellites.
For information about the MidSTAR program, click here .
