Georgia Tech students operate NASA satellite in orbit

Welcome back, everyone. Well, Georgia Tech students are taking their classroom experience out of this world, as we often see them do there, and they are helping to operate a spacecraft in orbit right from Atlanta. This is pretty cool. Our Chris Rosenthal is joining us live with a look at the mission and how students are playing a role in the future of space exploration. So, Chris, good morning. What's going on? Yeah, so I am in the Space Systems Design Lab here at Georgia Tech, and you never would think in this modest building here on campus that students would be able to actually fly and operate a satellite. We have Zuzu and Marianne here, and Morgan, they're over here working on this satellite here that is up in space. This went up on October 1st, and we'll be up there for nine months. Where the students will be doing tests on this satellite. And I have Professor Glenn Leitze here. And tell me, you know... How does this work? What are you guys testing out here? Right, so this is a mission we're doing with NASA. It's called Ascent Propulsion Dual Mode, and it's called a technology demonstration satellite. So the goal here is to test a new propulsion system that is flying in space for the first time. And these students here, I mean, they are actually literally flying it, you know, as we speak, for, you know, all week, huh? Right. So they are the mission operators. So they talk to the satellite. It's going around the Earth, goes around the Earth every 100 minutes or so. And they send commands to it, and they get information from it about how it's doing and measure the performance of the propulsion system. Yeah, I was in here about 20, 30 minutes ago. They actually made contact with it. They're not in constant contact, but they made contact. And pretty exciting to see them intently working on the satellite here now. Um, How big is this thing? You guys have an example here, huh? Right. Yeah, these satellites are pretty small. And as you can see, I'm holding it. This is a one-to-one model. This is, of course, not the real thing, but this is a 3D-printed model of it. And the goal is to test the propulsion system, which is about half of the satellite. That's this side, and then everything else is kind of to record the measurements and send the data to the ground. So this is what we're testing. We've got one of the students here, Morgan, you know, let me ask you here, as a student, I mean, what does it mean you'd have this opportunity to be able to, you know, fly and take charge of a satellite here? I mean, it means a lot. This is basically real-world experience we're able to get here, and it gives us a lot of the skills and then also some soft skills, like communicating with the team, that'll help us in our future full-time positions. Yeah, is this something you think that will... Help you lead to your career, maybe your next job here? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, what's it like when you make contact? It's definitely very thrilling. I remember when we first got contact with the spacecraft, everyone in here was cheering and clapping. It was years of work put in that we got to see. Finally visualized and now it feels almost a bit more like a video game simulation but it's really up there. It's communicating with us. We're able to communicate with it and it just feels great every time we're able to actually get in contact with it. And real quick, what was the first thing you guys said to it? The first thing we said to it I think was like It was Go Jackets. We sent up what we call a nom op string just to hear from it. We get down messages from it. So we were just able to hear Go Jackets back. All right. Well, the students will be here for nine months, helping fly the satellite, learning about propulsion and just a really great opportunity for these students here. Very nice.