The Nebraska Student Satellite Program is an extension of the National Space Grant Student Satellite Program (NSSP).  Through Dr. Michael Larson, a NASA Nebraska Space Grant Consortium (NSGC) researcher, Nebraska has incorporated the innovative NSSP into its educational outreach initiatives.  The NSGC strives to provide national leadership in applied aspects of aeronautics throughout the state.  The incorporation of the NSSP as a NSGC initiative allows for increased public exposure to NASA opportunities. Through the NSSP, students design, build, fly, and operate a broad range of spacecraft. These students arrive with different levels of skill, knowledge, and experience. Therefore, missions of growing complexity provide opportunities to acquire baseline skills and then to build on them.  National Space Grant’s goal is to make aerospace history by sending the first student-built satellites to Mars.

Larson attended the “Starting Student Space Hardware Programs II: A How To Workshop” in Boulder, Colorado from June 12-14, 2003.  The workshop introduced Dr. Larson to the National Space Grant Student Satellite Program (NSSP) and focused on the Balloon Satellites (BalloonSat) Program, which allows participants to construct, launch, recover and analyze data from experimental packets launched to ‘near space’ using a helium-filled balloon as the transport vehicle.  Teams of three were assigned the task of collecting the specific data at different altitudes from launch (approximately 5000 feet msl) to balloon burst (approximately 90,000 feet msl).  Such data included, atmospheric pressure, internal temperature, external temperature, relative humidity, solar cell voltage output, and 35 mm photos (approximate rate of 1 photo every 3 minutes).

The balloons and experimental packets were tracked using Global Positioning System (GPS) telemetry displayed on a laptop computer moving map display.   All participants were successful in locating and retrieving their packets and downloading the data for analysis.The goal of the NSSP is to: (1) give the participants the tools to start their own programs, (2) give participants the confidence to start their own programs, (3) give the participants the experience to start their own programs, (4) to provide the participants with an enjoyable and relevant method to the study of ‘near space’. 

Through the NNSP and BalloonSat programs, Dr. Larson was able to incorporate such activities into the University of Nebraska at Omaha 2003 Aerospace Education Teachers Workshop during the week of July 21-25, 2003.