Small Spacecraft Community of Practice
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Overview of RamSat Mission
Speaker: Dr. Peter E. Thornton, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
10:00AM-11:00AM Pacific Daylight Time
Click here to download the presentation.
Please contact Julianna.L.Fishman@nasa.gov if you experience issues with the audiovisual connection to this webinar.
Abstract: Students and instructors at Robertsville Middle School, in the Oak Ridge Public Schools system of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, designed, built, and operated a 2U cubesat to study the regrowth of forests following catastrophic wildfire. Their mission was inspired by the fires that burned through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in the Fall of 2016. A team of mentors worked with the students and classroom teachers for six years, learning together how to build and operate a satellite mission for low Earth orbit. This presentation explores how the complexity of the mission was managed to provide a strong learning experience for the students while offering the best possible odds for technical success. The critical role of an open-science community for radio operations is also highlighted.
Biosketch: Peter is a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He studies biogeochemistry of land, coastal, and aquatic ecosystems, and incorporates that knowledge into models to improve predictions of future climate. His research spans spatial scales from plots to the global Earth system. A special focus of his research is the coupling of the biotic and abiotic cycling of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus which limit growth and metabolism of plants and microbes. Peter is the Director for ORNL’s Climate Change Science Institute, which brings together researchers from across the Lab with shared interests and expertise in climate change science, impacts, and solutions. He is also Section Head for the Earth Systems Science Section within ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division, which integrates the efforts of empiricists, experimentalists, and modelers working at scales from sites to watersheds to the globe. Peter has been recognized multiple times by Clarivate’s Web of Science as a Highly Cited Researcher. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Peter is a mentor to several technology projects within the Oak Ridge Public Schools and serves as a board member for the Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation. He enjoys running, hiking, and making music.
S3VI encourages the community to submit questions before the webinar to enable more directed responses. Please send questions to craig.d.burkhard@nasa.gov.
