May 7, 2010

Sant Bani freshman, Andrew Mahn, reported to the school at Morning Session on his experiences with rocketry in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

Andrew began his competitive engineering work about five years ago with LEGO robotics. Through that venue he became aware of other types of engineering competitions including rocketry and he was hooked. He has been working with the Team America Rocketry Challenge, which is associated with NASA, with Mr. Mark Kibler since then, competing in The Plains, Virginia. After successfully competing there, the team went on to the NASA Student Launch Initiative, the world’s largest competition for rocketry headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama. There they were noticed by another organization called ARLISS: A Rocket Launch for International Student Satellites.

It was the ARLISS program which brought Andrew and his team to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. For that competition the team designed one of the biggest rockets that they’ve ever made and used. The other rockets were only designed to meet a specific purpose: to carry two eggs safely to an altitude of 750 feet, for 45 seconds and to land safely with the eggs intact. This project was much more open-ended. The sky was the limit, so to speak.

For this competition the students had to design a rocket that flew, but what it did while it was there and how high it went was up to them. They decided to use their rocket to study climate change and global warming. The team designed a satellite that would measure concentrations of the most prevalent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, water vapor and carbon dioxide. They also had to correlate that with the altitude and the temperature. The experiment would either succeed and work perfectly, or completely fail. However, Mr. Kibler says that working on the project from start to finish is a success all in itself (see video).

This year Andrew worked primarily as the computer programmer for the project. Next year he is the team captain and will have to work as he’s done on other projects to coordinate all of the aspects of pulling the experiment together.