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ACES: Aerospace Catalyst
Experiences for Students
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ACES-01
Successfully Launched and Recovered May 21, 2003

We would like to thank Victor
Davison, Randall Henderson, Scott Hadley, Don Bunt, John Hobbie, Marty
Crabill, Paul Brasfield, Fred Perrin, Michelle Johnson, Bettie, Furman,
Glen Gusa, Bill Stepp and Danny Ball at the National Scientific Balloon
Facility for hosting our group and providing support both prior to and
during flight operations. In addition, members of the Baton Rouge
Amateur Radio Club (Chris Dore, Justin Pauler) and the Palestine /
Anderson County Amateur Radio Club (Jack Coleman) provided important
communication, tracking and internet relay services during the flight
and recovery.
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A Student Satellite Project of the Louisiana Space Consortium
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 The
ACES Project is a one-year Workforce Development pilot program that exposes
undergraduate students to aspects of the aerospace project life cycle including
design, fabrication, integration, testing and flight, while providing real
experiences in project management and team coordination. During the 2002-03
academic year, students meet Tuesday and Thursday nights for lectures and
hands-on bench work.
Fifteen students from LSU and Southern are organized into five teams,
each designing and building two devices: a CricketSat (to learn circuitry and
soldering skills and to measure temperature profiles of an “alien planet” around
campus) and a CanSat payload (to fly to 80,000 ft in altitude aboard a
scientific sounding balloon.) in mid-May 2003 at the National
Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas. The scientific goals for the
teams are to measure: ultraviolet radiation, temperature and pressure of outside
air, flux of cosmic rays, ozone concentration, Infrared radiation, and the
characteristics of the Earth’s magnetic field.
ACES resulted from a successful LaSPACE proposal to the Space
Grant Workforce Augmentation Competition, tapping
additional funds provided by
Congress to Space Grant. Influencing the enrollment, motivation and retention of
university-level students in fields such as science, math and engineering is key
to populating the workforce “pipeline.”
Projects like ACES complement other Space Grant workforce development activities such as scholarships, fellowships, mentored research awards, and educational outreach. These programs offer new opportunities for
Louisiana students.
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Across America, Space Grant students are learning from the ground
up--literally--by designing, building, flying and operating a broad range of
spacecraft. Students come with an interest in Space, but with different levels
of skill, knowledge, and experience. Missions of growing complexity provide
opportunities to acquire baseline skills and then to build on them. We call this
strategy "crawl", "walk", "run" and "fly!". Our goal is to make aerospace
history and send the first student-built satellites to Mars.
http://ssp.arizona.edu/sgsatellites/programs.shtml
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