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CU-Boulder student who worked on instrument aboard New Horizons anxious for spacecraft to reach Pluto
July 13, 2015听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 Beth Cervelli
When the New Horizons spacecraft encounters Pluto early tomorrow morning several CU-Boulder alumni will realize a decade full of dreams and no one more so than Beth Cervelli.
Cervelli, who is a flight software engineer at CU-Boulder鈥檚 Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, is one of a number of CU-Boulder students who more than a decade ago built the Student Dust Collector instrument aboard New Horizons.
CUT 1 鈥淚t鈥檚 very surreal because when you work on this and you know that we are going to have to wait 10 whole years to get the pictures back but then it finally is that 10 years. It鈥檚 hard to believe that all that time has passed and we鈥檙e still there and everything is still working. (:18) It鈥檚 very cool to have been a part of that - especially for Pluto. This is probably the one and only chance in our lifetime that we鈥檒l be flying by this dwarf planet.鈥� (:29)
Cervelli was an undergraduate in 2003 earning a software engineering degree when she helped create the flight and ground based software for the instrument 鈥� one that has been collecting samples of space dust since the craft blasted off for Pluto in 2006.
CUT 2 鈥淭he job of the Student Dust Counter is to count dust particles as we travel from the Earth to Pluto and beyond. It is basically a plastic film that sits on the outside of the spacecraft in the direction the spacecraft is moving听 - basically like the windshield. (:15) So as the spacecraft moves it flies through dust and those dust particles impact out detector and the electronics pick up those signals and store them. And then once a year we send those signals to the spacecraft and the spacecraft sends them down to the ground.鈥� (:29)
The dust collector can only detect the size of the dust not the compositions, adds Cervelli. But the fact that students built this instrument and that it is still working and working well is what she finds amazing.
CUT 3听 鈥淚t鈥檚 amazing. I mean we knew what we were doing, we thought it would work but it actually is working and it鈥檚 been running for nine years without so much as a hic up.听 (:16) And just to know that we were able to accomplish that - that is amazing to me.鈥� (:21)
New Horizons will have its closest encounter with Pluto tomorrow at 5:50 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time and you can bet that Cervelli and a host of CU-Boulder alumni who worked on the dust collecting instrument will be waiting for news from NASA that the spacecraft has safely arrived.
-CU-