Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406190059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium
The shuttle Discovery is scheduled to blast off Sept. 9 carrying a student project designed and built at the Norfolk Technical Vocational Center.
The experiment, a device designed to better understand how sound waves behave, will be packed into an aluminum canister roughly the size of a 55-gallon drum before flying into space.
The drum will be sealed and hooked to the shuttle's power grid. Astronauts will turn the experiment on and off with hand-held remote controls.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration calls the project a Get Away Special. It will be joined in space by others designed for flight by adult researchers from China, Japan, the Netherlands and the United States.
The device, built by Norfolk students Jeremy Estes, Summer Graves, Lisa Krueger, Maridel Mirador and Ricky Wallace will visually record acoustic patterns made by cork dust swirling inside plastic tubes.
Small tweeter speakers at the bottom of the tubes will produce the sound that will send the dust flying. Two hand-sized camcorders will record the results. The whole array is powered by 12 6-volt batteries.
The students participated in the experiment as part of the Norfolk Public Schools Science and Technology Advance Research Project, or NORSTAR.
The experiment has been shipped to Florida.
"We built it pretty quick. Seems like yesterday we hardly had anything done," Estes said. "I'm proud that we've worked on something that will go on the shuttle. I don't know too many high school students that have put an experiment in space."
Nationally, only a handful of high schoolers have managed to get approval for "GAS can" experiments. The Norfolk students received help from adult advisers at NASA Langley Research Center, teacher Joy Young and about a dozen other students.
"These are a group of high school students: shy, inexperienced, young," said Joseph Heyman, a NASA Langley scientist. "They grew up, matured, took on responsibility. Their package is flight-ready. They should be very, very proud of what they've done."
The students used a $10,000 grant from NASA, in addition to other donations, to design and build the project.
by CNB