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College Kids in Colorado Crash NASA Satellite

by Amar Toor on September 2, 2010 at 11:16 AM

students from university of colorado at laspAs part of what must be the coolest undergraduate class ever, a group of students from the University of Colorado at Boulder recently crashed a NASA satellite into the ocean -- on purpose. As PopSci explains, undergrads and professors at UC-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) spent a full seven years monitoring NASA's Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) as it collected data on polar ice, ice sheets and sea ice dynamics, as well.

Eventually, though, the satellite ran out of fuel, and it was time to put her to bed. So, after conducting calculations and simulating re-entry scenarios for seven days, the team finally decided to crash ICESat into the Barents Sea, just north of Norway and Russia, where collateral damage would be minimized. They then set the satellite on an appropriate trajectory, and watched with glee as it re-entered the atmosphere, burned up and met its watery death.

The crash may have been the highlight of their young academic careers, but many students who participated in the program are confident that the experience will prove to have helped prepare them for life beyond college. "It's amazing for an undergraduate like me to get hands-on experience controlling multimillion-dollar NASA satellites," said aerospace engineering sciences student Katelynn Finn, a junior who has been an LASP satellite mission controller for more than a year. "The experience I'm getting at LASP is already preparing me for a career in aerospace once I get out of college."

Tags: LaboratoryForAerospaceAndPhysics, lasp, NASA, satellite, science, space, top, undergrad, undergraduate, UniversityOfColorado, UniversityOfColoradoAtBoulder

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