After multiple years of work, along with some setbacks, students in Centaurus High School's physics club are ready to build a space plane payload with a goal of contributing to climate change research.
Students, with the help of a new club mentor, spent the last few months building a functioning prototype and now are raising money to buy the materials to build the real version. Their goal is to raise $10,000, build the instrument and travel to Dawn Aerospace in New Zealand for test flights in the spring.
Senior Tristan Pluzynski, who has been in the club for four years and is the president this year, described the space plane initiative as the club's capstone project.
"It's by far the most interesting project and could lead to some change in the world," he said. "I really want to get it good enough to move forward."
The club connected with Dawn Aerospace after submitting a proposal in a 2020 competition, winning the opportunity to build a payload for the company's rocket-propelled airplane.
The students' research is focused on direct sampling and analyzing the mesosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere, where there have been few observations because of the specialized aircraft and instrumentation needed to sample air at that altitude. Weather balloons can't go that high, while traditional space rockets blast right past it.
If the students' air collection attempt is successful, their plan is to analyze and interpret the collected air samples with help from scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"It's really crucial science," junior Daniel Martin said. "The mesosphere, we really know nothing about it."
Before the winter break, several club members at the Lafayette school joined a virtual call with Dawn Aerospace employees to share their progress and go over technical specifications, including the need to verify that their equipment won't overheat at altitude.
As the company has made changes to the design of the space plane, the parameters the students must meet also have changed. The amount of power they can use to collect the data was lowered, for example, as was the amount of time they have to collect it.
"Designing it to what might happen is a lot harder than designing it to what we know," Martin said. "Uncertainty has been our biggest challenge. There were a lot of issues. The math is complex."
With the project taking multiple school years to complete, graduating seniors have passed along their knowledge and work before they leave to keep the momentum going. Last school year, students ran into some roadblocks as they worked on prototypes, and they put the project on hold.
To provide some professional engineering expertise, Daniel Martin's dad, Jerry Martin, signed on this school year as the club's parent mentor. The club's teacher sponsor, science teacher Kimberly Becker, said his leadership has been pivotal in helping the students create a functional prototype.
"We're going to do everything we can to push forward," Jerry Martin said. "We think we're going to get there. It should theoretically function. It's way more feasible now."
Along with the Dawn Aerospace project, the 30 students in the club are working on several initiatives that included competing in an annual December engineering challenge hosted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.
This year's contest required teams to build an automated machine that would launch, within 60 seconds, 50 peanut candies over a barrier and into a triangular Plexiglas container. As an out-of-state team, the Centaurus students are required to enter their project in the contest's professional division.
"They get to create wacky, silly things that involve real engineering," Becker said. "Our students are very good at making artistic and creative designs."
The 18-student Centaurus team took third in their division this year and won an overall award for most artistic for their "Cloudy with a Chance of Peanut Candies" submission. A Centaurus team also won the most artistic award last year, as well as first place in the professional division.
The club's third main project is an international particle physics competition organized by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Competing in the CERN competition was the reason students started the Physics Club in 2018. In 2019, the club was "shortlisted" as a semifinalist, which meant their proposal made it to the top 10%. The grand prize is a trip to Europe to carry out the proposed experiment.
Last year's Centaurus CERN team also was shortlisted, making it one of three shortlisted proposals from schools in the United States.
Becker said this year's team plans to improve on last school year's experiment on Cherenkov radiation, with a goal of building an array of photo multiplier tubes that CERN reviewers have told them would be needed to carry out their experiment.
"We know what we have to do," junior Vibeke Andersen said.
As they work on improving the CERN proposal, the club's students also are building a cloud chamber with materials sent as a prize for having the project shortlisted last year.
Several members said that, while a physics club can sound intimidating or like homework, it's a mix of hands-on projects and opportunities to connect with others with the same interests.
"It's not just hanging out and doing math," said senior Eli Avery, who is considering majoring in aerospace engineering. "It's also just fun. Going to JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) has been a great way to get to know people in an industry I'm interested in. It's a good experience."