|
news:
NASA, CSULB offer
space work
By Maya Yamane
On-line Forty-Niner
The California
State University Long Beach University College and Extension
Services is offering the opportunity for students, professionals
and anybody interested to work on a space project.
The program is
offered in conjunction with the NASA Get-Away-Special, or
GAS, Program, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Orange County Section, Orange County College Research Club
and Cal Poly Pomona, said Mark Smith, program administrator
of professional technical programming for University College
and Extension Services.
The GAS Program
is worldwide and allows individuals and public and private
companies to fly experimental payloads on a United States
space shuttle at a low cost, he said.
CSULB students,
engineers and technical writers, who had been invited to attend
sessions for a $199 fee, joined other scientists to help with
an on-shuttle experiment.
"This particular
group got a moon rock and decided to build an oven to melt
the rock and then turn it off to watch it harden," Smith
said. "They hope to figure out how to use material on
the moon's surface to build houses on the moon."
Once the experiment
is completed in space, the group will contact NASA, which
will tell them which flight they will fly the experiment on,
he said.
Next, the group
and their experiment will go to Florida, where the lunar material
will be put in canisters, attached to the space shuttle, and
flown into space. The material will be melted in near zero
gravity on the shuttle, then flown back. The participants
will then write a final report of the results.
The idea for the
experiment began in the fall 1994 semester, according to information
on the University College and Extension Services Web site.
The GAS Program
was initiated in the mid-seventies to provide a diverse user
community with extremely low cost access to space, according
to information provided by NASA.
The project is
supervised by American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Orange County Section. GAS Project Chairman and team leader
Harry Staubs and project advisor Brian Dubow, Smith said.
Staubs has over
30 years of aerospace experience as a U.S. Air Force research
and development officer and as a senior staff specialist with
McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Company, according to the
information provided by UCES.
Dubow was a project
manager for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
San Diego Section GAS project for over 10 years. He was also
manager of Life Science Space Flight Experiments at UC
San Diego, and a systems engineer on missile and space projects
at General Dynamics.
"The current
schedule says we'll be done by the end of the year,"
Smith said.
There are currently
15-20 active participants, he said.
|
