About the Program
The Olin-NASA partnership was created by Dr. Steve Holt, former director of Space Sciences at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in 2004. Dr. Holt is now a professor of physics at The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA.
Eight undergraduate Olin College engineering students hear about a variety of possible projects from NASA scientists. Students select four projects. Each student works in a four-student team on each of two different projects. The program provides an opportunity for students to apply their skills to real-world problems. The work done by students can be continued in a following summer or put into everyday use at Goddard and other NASA facilities.
Current Projects
There are four projects in progress this summer. Visit the list of all projects to read about past and present projects conducted by the Olin-NASA Research Group.
CubeSat Solar Sensor (SOS)
The University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in collaboration with NASA's Goddard SFC is seeking to send a 3x1 CubeSat into a brief Low Earth Orbit mission to observe cloud formation in the atmosphere. This small, expendable satellite will measure no more than 30x10x10 cm and have a mass no more than 3kg. This is comparable in size to a typical loaf of sliced bread and will have the mass of 3L of water (~0.8 gallons of water or ~6.5 lbs).
The first CubeSat-related project this summer is the Solar Sensor project. The satellite must know its orientation relative to some fixed point in order to control its attitude. The Solar Sensor group will evaluate, design and build a sun finder which will enable the satellite to orient itself relative to the sun.
CubeSat Attitude Control System (ACS)
The second CubeSat-related project is the Attitude Control System. The ACS team aims to utilise magnetic coils in the satellite in order to interact with the earth's magnetic field and create a torque on the satellite. This will enable the satellite to orient itself in whatever manner necessary to carry out its scientific mission.
Low-Cost USB Multichannel Analyzer (MCA)
Many scientific instruments output a signal consisting of pulses. The MCA team seeks to construct a USB peripheral device that can take one of these signals (which can vary greatly depending on the instrument creating the signal), and record the timing and pulse height for each event. The device will be cheap enough that it can be manufactured and used by many NASA scientists in place of similar but much more expensive instruments.
Continuous Adiabatic Demagnitization Refrigerator (ADR)
An X-Ray Calorimeter requires a very temperature-stable thermal mass in order to accurately record the energy of incident X-ray photons. Existing X-ray observatories in orbit, such as Chandra, use a single-stage ADR followed by cryogenic helium. This helium is growing more expensive, and the gradual increase in temperature limits the satellite's total mission length. This project seeks to incorporate PID control and feed-forward into a multi-stage ADR system, which would enable cooling by radiation and continuous satellite operation.