A few times a week, Adam Gunderson walks into a room in Cobleigh Hall at Montana State University and waits. Sometimes he waits while other students rush to and from class. Other times he waits when most of them have already gone to bed. But he’s always waiting.
Waiting for a sound to come back, one that would remind most people of an old dial-up tone – static, two beeps, more static. To most it’s meaningless. To Gunderson, a Kalispell native and Flathead High School graduate, and his classmates in the Space Science and Engineering Lab, it means the world.
The sound is a radio signal emanating from a small cube satellite that was built by students in Bozeman and launched on a NASA rocket late last month. On average, the satellite passes over near Bozeman six times a day, during its 14 orbits of the earth every 24 hours. The 3.9-inch-by-3.9-inch box was launched as part of NASA’s ELaNa project, which provides space to university research satellites on rockets.
“To be able to hear something that you made in space is pretty awesome,” Gunderson said. “It’s indescribable. I mean my name is on it!”
But the road to being part of a team that built this was, at times, a bumpy one, Gunderson’s mom Candi Naylor said. Gunderson often spent his childhood playing video games and ignoring schoolwork: “He really didn’t apply himself,” she said. “He wasn’t a model student.”
Naylor said she even worried whether her son would graduate from high school. She did know that her son was interested in computers and spent most of his formative years tinkering with electronics.
“We’d always take it away from him – television, computers, video games – we had to budget his time. I mean if we didn’t he would spend 24 hours a day on them,” Naylor said.
When Gunderson graduated from high school he surprised his parents by telling them he was going to enlist in the Navy. His mother said it turned out to be the best thing for him and he was able to focus on his interest in electronics, specializing in communication. Naylor said they always knew he had the “smarts.”
After six years in the Navy, Gunderson enrolled at MSU and will graduate with a degree in electrical engineering in May 2012. While there, Gunderson has interned for aerospace companies, including the company that built the Mars Rover. Yet the work he’s most proud of is what he has done in the laboratory in Bozeman.
Gunderson has been part of a team working with other universities, including Cal Poly, on creating the small cube satellite that was sent into space in late October. The mission of the small research vehicle is to gather data about space weather, which could then be used to better predict storms that can hamper communication and electrical grids here on earth.
Of course, MSU doesn’t have a rocket of its own to propel the satellite into space. That’s where NASA stepped in. Dr. David Klumpar, a research professor at MSU, said universities have been working with the space agency to allow academic groups to put their research satellites on NASA rockets for the last decade. When a rocket is launched, there is usually some extra space for smaller satellites to be released after the main cargo has been deployed. Finally, in 2011, NASA allowed three satellites from MSU and other schools after a vigorous selection process. The satellites were selected and loaded into a pea pod device, designed by scientists at Cal Poly.
“It’s a complicated process and each year, starting about three years ago, there’s been a call for proposals and we’ve been successful every time. I think that’s a sign of how good our students are,” Klumpar said. “That’s something Montana can be really proud of.”
Another primary goal for the MSU students is to prove that space research can be achieved economically. It was a goal that came in handy after a failed attempt to launch the satellite in March.
Just before the rocket was to be released from the earth’s gravitational pull, a cone is supposed to separate from the vehicle. But soon after the March launch, the first one to carry the university satellites, the cone did not separate and the rocket was too heavy to break away from the earth. The rocket, and MSU’s satellite, slowly fell into the ocean.
Watching on a television in Bozeman, Gunderson and the rest of the team knew something had gone wrong when they heard the words “contingency” at Mission Control.
“That hit us pretty hard. When they call it a contingency, it’s pretty bad,” Gunderson said. “We pretty much knew we were done.”
Six months later things were much different at Vandenburg Air Force Base on the California coast. Gunderson was selected to represent MSU at the launch on Oct. 27., and as the rocket lifted off, he ran outside and watched it coast through the night sky. It was the culmination of all the lonely work in the laboratory in Bozeman.
“It’s a pretty long time to wait, but it was worth it,” he said.
Three weeks later the satellite is still circling the earth and was quickly approaching 10 million miles traveled. The satellite will keep racking up the miles until it burns up some time in 2014. Gunderson said the satellite is currently too close to the other ones launched so he and his team are unable to control it just yet. But soon they will be able to gather data from it and better understand space weather. A handful of times each day it flies close enough to where Gunderson and the students at MSU can hear its signature squawk, letting them know that everything is working.
To most people, it’s just a series of beeps and static, but to the students in Bozeman it represents all of their hard work. And all the work that is yet to be done.
That is why they wait.