The principal objectives of Project STARSHINE are educational and motivational. If students help "build" the spacecraft (by polishing its mirrors), they should be more excited about tracking it and using it to measure upper atmospheric density and the response of that region of the atmosphere to solar storms.
Project STARSHINE is giving precollege students a chance to work with real space hardware and learn how to do precision work on elements of that hardware. They also learn about satellite orbits and Earth's upper atmosphere and the interaction between the Earth's and sun's atmospheres and magnetospheres. The participants use the Internet to obtain knowledge, report their measurements, and communicate as team members with students in other countries. They are taught how to make precision optical measurements and use precision timing systems to make those measurements, and they learn something about
observational astronomy and amateur radio. In short, they learn that science and engineering and technology can be fun and still produce useful results.
The project has received overwhelmingly positive responses from teachers and students around the world--before the satellite leaves the ground. When the satellite completes its six months in orbit, project officials believe that they will have built up a cadre of student participants who will be interested in becoming even more involved in future projects of this nature.
If Project STARSHINE is able to fly a satellite every year throughout an 11-year solar cycle, as presently planned, generations of students will learn the basic principles of solar-terrestrial physics. To further this end, the project plans to post daily white-light, ground-based images of the sun on its Web site as well as satellite images in other wavelengths and will link to other solar activity indices in Boulder, Colo. In the fall, the project will begin posting auroral images as well.
Besides educating and motivating students, Project STARSHINE may have scientific benefits. If enough students do serious tracking of the spacecraft to get good orbits, especially during the terminal phase of the flight, the project might be able contribute to the pool of knowledge of the average density of the atmosphere in the 60- to 120-mile altitude regime. Since STARSHINE is spherical, it has a much more unifom drag coefficient than spacecraft with solar arrays and helical antennas and other structures protruding from them, so the density measurements that will be made from tracking STARSHINE will be more precise than those from tracking other reentering spacecraft. |
