ISAS Academy 1: Day 6

The students' day began with a presentation from the Boise State University SPHERE (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage Reorient, Experimental Satellites) coordinators. The presenters were a graduate student, Nilab and an undergraduate student, Marina. They and their team are the link between the MIT Zero Robotics Program and high schools and middle schools around the state of Idaho. The challenges for both teams change annually, but always involve programing a spherical robot to accomplish a selected task in space. Winning teams get to send their codes to a SPHERE on the ISS for testing. This year’s challenge is keeping a meteor from hitting earth. Students learned how they could form their own Zero Robotics Team.

College students shared a program with our ISAS scholars about the high school SPHERE opportunities.

Soon afterwards students had the opportunity to participate in a teleconference with Dan Isla who is a Boise State University graduate and Systems Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Dan Isla worked on the Assembly Test and Launch Operations Team (ATLO) for the Mars Rover Curiosity and talked about the seven minutes of terror landing, the rover's activities on the planet and its instrumentation. Students had their last chance to talk to an expert about their mission before tomorrow's presentations, and they also asked questions about the road to a NASA career including opportunities at BSU and other colleges and high schools in general.

Students asking questions during Dan Isla's teleconference in.

The students had the opportunity to participate in workshops that provided a hands on approach to different career fields including biology, DNA detection, antibiotic development, cryptology, robotics, and motion analysis. The students worked with college students, graduate students and professors to complete different experiments in these areas of study. Experiments varied from making gold pennies, to capturing their own strands of DNA, to programing a rover to find water on Mars.

Students attempt to read an encrypted message using a computer program.

Boiling chemicals, one student prepares to alter a penny to appear as gold.

These students worked hard to prepare for the banquet on Saturday, where they will present and display their final presentations. They had time to work with their team and to practice addressing the audience as they gave their presentation. They have accomplished much this past week at the academy and they are excited to share what they have learned with you. We hope to see you tomorrow!


Don't forget to check out the Facebook and Twitter pages for more videos and ISAS content.

--Camille Eddy (ISAS 2012 alumna) and
Holly Palmer (ISAS 2013 alumna)
ISAS Social Media Mentors