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Mars Yard
Kitts has even bolder plans for the technology center: he aims to create a landscape there that looks like Mars-a "Mars Yard." It will resemble the surface of Mars and allow students, children, and the public to remotely drive rovers similar to those on the red planet today. Kitts is putting the final pieces of funding together now, hoping that some of next fall's seniors can develop it for their senior design project. The yard, which will also be used extensively for research studies, will be in a parking lot next to the STC.
The Mars Yard should prove to be a popular site for local school children, who already visit the Robotics Systems Lab at SCU. For those who can't make it to the yard, a web site will offer a chance to control the rovers.
SCU in space
SCU's space program, as it were, began in 1998 with the construction of a satellite called Barnacle. Government regulations on international cooperation involving spacecraft prevented Barnacle from launching into orbit, but the project set the stage for future successes. In 1999 came Artemis, a collection of three small satellites built by a seven-member team of female engineering students. The satellites were launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California in January 2000.
And the program has literally taken off from there. The Robotics Systems Lab has contracts with such federal agencies as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to build robots and conduct research. Other universities, including Stanford, MIT, Washington University of St. Louis, and the University of Texas, have hired SCU to build components for their space satellites.
This spring, SCU senior Jennifer Lundquist is part of a four-woman senior design team building a satellite that will be part of a larger satellite being built by Washington University. "Our team is dealing with the communication between two transceivers [a transmitter] on the main satellite and one on [ours]," she explains. "Another SCU group is working on the communications between the ground and the main satellite."
Students say they enjoy building the projects after years of soaking up theories in class. "This was way more intriguing and sophisticated because it was hands on," says Rob Watson '03, who worked on a microsatellite project.
Students also get the opportunity to work with students from different realms of engineering. In Lundquist's group, for example, her colleagues are from mechanical and electrical engineering. Other projects have included students majoring in computer engineering.
"They learn the vocabulary of other engineers in a different discipline, how to interact with them and work in a team, how to do their own management as a team," Kitts says.
Alumni careers take off
Alumni speak highly of their experiences in the robotics lab.
"Chris is all about linking engineering concepts and theories to the real world," said Maureen Breiling '99 who worked on Artemis, "and that's really what gets the students excited."
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| SCU’s Carleton Cheng, Peter Salas, and Christopher Kitts and others from the University will collaborate with NASA on projects at the Space Technology Center. |
Chad Bullich '98, M.S. '03 is a mechanical design engineer at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company in Sunnyvale. "I would credit the robotics lab with developing all the skills I use today-working on teams and applying engineering knowledge to real-world robotics," he says. Bullich now designs entire solar panel systems for spacecraft-a logical extension of work he did as an undergrad designing a miniature power system with solar cells.
Corina Hu '99, who works in the flight software group at Space Systems/Loral in Palo Alto, was one of the members of the Artemis team. She says the project had a dramatic impact on her career. "Without that project, I wouldn't be here right now," she says. Artemis "prompted me to apply for a masters in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, and subsequently really inspired me to pursue a career in the space industry. It opened doors and possibilities that I never even considered before," she explains.
Eric Hulin '00, who at SCU worked on an underwater robotic vehicle called Mantaris, says "I think what helped me most in the lab was the hands-on experience that I got from designing something from start to finish. The projects that I was able to work on there were not basic projects-they required hard work and a lot of teamwork." Hulin works for Acushnet Company in San Diego, where he is a manufacturing engineer in the company's golf club operations building. The SCU projects, he says, "made me very aware of what engineering is all about, and I think I was more confident upon graduation because of the lab."
SCU students have worked on 10 satellites since Kitts came to the University five years ago. At one point, students were going to see one of their student-built satellites used on the U.S. space shuttle missions. But after the shuttle Columbia exploded in early 2003, the satellite launch of Emerald was put on hold.
