Vermont Quarterly, Summer 1997

UVM students will have a rare opportunity to develop and test their talents on a project for the nation's space program. NASA has selected an interdisciplinary proposal from a team of UVM faculty, along with five other projects from across the country, for the agency's new Student Launch Program. UVM students will be building the payload for a NASA Nike-Orion rocket to be launched in summer 1999.

The UVM project, called "Effects of a Sounding Rocket Flight on Drosophila," will be a biomedical experiment using fruit flies, contained in the rocket's payload, or nose cone. It will measure the effects of short-duration space flight and weightlessness on Drosophila, or fruit flies, and will test new hardware which measures the activity of the flies during the flight. UVM engineering students will design the payload skin, support structure and nose cone. They will have to solve a variety of engineering problems, such as how to build a buoyant payload in which the fruit flies can survive the trip safely, and be accessible to measurement NASA's instruments. The students will explore using other materials like fiberglass or wood laminates, in place of the usual aluminum.

The nose cone and payload will be constructed on campus and at local businesses, and should be completed by May 1999. The rocket is scheduled to be launched in July 1999 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. After a five-minute flight, the nose cone will separate from the rocket and the Coast Guard will recover it from the Atlantic Ocean. The sounding rocket, an unguided, fin-stabilized rocket system, is the same type NASA launched last March to study the Hale-Bopp comet.

Tony Keller, associate professor of mechanical engineering and codirector of the Vermont Space Grant Consortium and the Biomedical Engineering Program, is lead investigator on the project. Mark Miller, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, will coordinate the program. Keller expects between 10 and 20 undergraduate and graduate students from biology, molecular physiology and biophysics and engineering to participate.
 

To get students involved in the Student Launch Program, Keller will offer an independent study course next fall for students interested in the flight experiment and designing and building of the payload. Other students may choose to take the integrated Product Development course, offered jointly by mechanical engineering, statistics and business administration. In this course students will be able to design a specific component of the payload. Students under David Maughan, research professor in molecular physiology and biophysics, will be able to work on designing and building a device to measure oxygen consumption and/or carbon dioxide production by the fruit flies. Other students may work on the genetics of the fruit flies with Jim Vigoreaux, assistant professor of biology. Still others will be able to work with business administration faculty William Baker, Dale Grinnell, Larry Shirland and James Sinkula on public relations or market research for the project.