Students ESCAPE on Space Shuttle

Last month, CU students once again sent an experiment they designed and built into space. ESCAPE II (Experiment of the Sun for Complementing the ATLAS Payload and for Education) was the first CU student-developed payload to earn the status of a Secondary Payload to NASA's ATLAS (Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications & Science) project. This means that "the experiment is manifested directly onto a specific shuttle mission and granted certain privileges, including more crew interaction," says Chris Koehler, an aerospace graduate student and project manager of ESCAPE II.

"Not only is this status a first for CU," adds Jeannette Martinez, an aerospace undergraduate and the safety engineer for ESCAPE II, "but I don't think any other university in the country has ever achieved it with a student project of this kind."


Embracing NASA's new "better, faster, cheaper"
philosophy, Jeanette Martinez and other CU
engineering and science students designed, built
and tested ESCAPE II within a $17,000 budget
and in 18 months' time.

ESCAPE II is one of several research projects sponsored by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, a group of 13 colleges and institutions linked by NASA in 1989 as a part of a national effort to help maintain America's preeminence in space. While many of these projects combine the efforts of several Colorado educational institutions, ESCAPE II comes solely from the hands and minds of 60 CU engineering and science students. The students did all the planning, design, and assembly, receiving some equipment and expertise from companies like Ball Aerospace, CID Technologies, Martin Marietta, and TRW.


The space shuttle Altantis heads
for orbit (photo courtesy of NASA).

"Industry and NASA work very closely with us," says Martinez, "because they have been impressed that we are not just kids dinking around in a lab but a professionally-oriented team with the goal of flying a scientific payload on the shuttle."

The goal of ESCAPE II is to provide new information on how the sun's soft X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths affect the temperature and chemical composition of Earth's upper atmosphere. Very little research has been done in this area because of the technical difficulties of calibrating a spectrometer that far out on the spectrum.

CU students overcame these difficulties though, and with their new data Martinez says, "we can look at the sun's natural radiation and compare it to what's happening in the Earth's atmosphere. This will give us a much better idea of what damage is being caused by human activities."

The ESCAPE II experiment flew aboard the space shuttle Atlantis from November 3 to November 14. The students of CU's Space Grant Consortium now plan to continue their atmospheric research with the launch of DATA-CHASER sometime in the summer of 1996.

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