Friday, July 23, 2010

Project Overview
This program will be a Summer 2010 program AND an after school program that will run during the 1st semester of the 2010/11 school year. Students must be enrolled in the AMSE Program in order to be on the ISS Project Team. Students may enroll into the AMSE Program here: /quicklinks/mathscience/hs-application if they will be a high school student during the Fall, 2010 term. NOTE: Applications to be part of the ISS Project Team are now closed.

Mr. SaldanaThe project will be guided by Mr. Dan Saldana (retired satellite design engineer) as well as a few other professionals in related fields. Students will work as a team to plan, design, program, build, test & document several printed circuit boards to interface with a science experiment (TBD) inside the CUBE-LAB. The entire CUBE-LAB project fits into a 4” x 4” x 4” aluminum box with a USB connector. The CUBE-LAB will be connected to the ISS astronaut’s computer via a USB cable and the data will be downloaded to VCHS each day, for 30 days, once the payload is in orbit at the ISS. This data will be aggregated and analyzed daily by the ISS Project Team. This is expected to happen during the February --> March 2011 timeframe

The project steps will be recorded in a documentary video that will be filmed and produced by VCHS students.

IV. Student Time Commitment
Since the launch date is currently expected to be in February of 2011 (see section V, below) , we are required to have the student built CUBE-LAB completed and ready to deliver to the University of Kentucky by early to mid November 2010 for pre-launch testing. The University of Kentucky will do all testing at their site and then forward our CUBE-LAB to Cape Canaveral. Our students will have done many pre-tests prior to shipment to the University of Kentucky.

In order to meet this aggressive schedule, VCS will select the ISS Project Student Team members by the end of April 2010 and start working on the project with the student during the summer of 2010; and, it will continue through the 1st semester of the 2010-2011 school year. During the first quarter of 2011, data from the CUBE-LAB aboard the ISS will be downloaded to the students and it will aggregated, analyzed, and a report will be written by the students on their findings.

The time commitment for a student on ISS Project team is in three parts, as follows:

Part-I: Summer 2010 (45 Hours):

July 12-16 1:30-4:30PM
July 19-23 1:30-4:30PM
July 26-30 1:30-4:30PM

Part-II: August – October 2010-2011 (55 hours)

Weekly, after school Tuesdays and Thursday (2 hours each day)*
Weekly, Saturday AM (2 hours)*

*Note: Some students may not be able to meet all three days (Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays) each week during the school year. Students needing to be excused from certain meeting dates will need to work with the ISS project team to stay current with their work commitments on this project.

Part-II February – March 2011 (35 hours)

The project experiment aboard the ISS will be monitored for 30 days during Q1 of 2011. Students from the project team will aggregate data daily (1hr x 30days) and report (5hrs) on this project by the end of March.

Students are also expected to work this project aside from the above schedule times if work is not completed during the project team meeting times.

The ISS Project goal is for students to be able to balance their school commitments with the success of the ISS Project. All students that participate in this program have much to gain if the project is a success.

V. Project Timeline

project schedule
















Click here for a larger image of the project schedule