A group of Roanoke College students called Team Slim Shady made a puffer jacket last year, but this story is about neither hip hop music nor fashion.
“Puffer jacket” was a student nickname for a starshade mockup, intended to help NASA observe far-away exoplanets from telescopes. The team name is a nod to rapper Eminem, but Slim Shady also referred to the team’s objective: to create a giant shade that can deploy from a small container in order to block out unwanted light from other stars and celestial objects, team member Art Duncan said.
The 10-person team and its faculty adviser, Truong Le, took on a project that offered no class credits or any other guarantee, and they made an astral hit. Their starshade design, executed on a small scale via hand-sewing as finals crept up, won them second place in a NASA contest.
The booty: $6,000 for the students to put toward research and related travel. The potential: NASA has invited the Roanoke College team to continue working on the project. The bonus: new friendships among like minds.
“I’m so thankful for the group as a whole and all that I gained from being around them so much last semester,” sophomore Addy Littlefield said.
The group, in a video chat and via subsequent email, detailed the winter 2023 project’s history.
Bobby Hoye, a senior and president of the college’s Society of Physics Students, received word in August that NASA had set up a challenge seeking ideas for a starshade for its Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets, or HOEE. The goal was to create a 100-meter diameter starshade in space to work with telescopes on earth to create “the most powerful planet finders yet designed,” according to NASA.
“The large telescope is needed because Earth-like planets are extremely faint,” NASA’s John Mather wrote on the page dedicated to the HOEE. “The starshade is needed to block the glare of the host stars; the sun is 10 billion times brighter than the Earth at visible wavelengths.”
Hoye said he immediately thought of Le, his astrophysics teacher from the previous semester.
“When I told him of the idea, we were both very hesitant but knew that we had to do it,” Hoye said.
Unlike the University of Notre Dame, which produced the first-place entry, Roanoke College has no satellite space engineering and design team. Unlike the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which finished third, Roanoke College has no Cajun Advanced Picosatellite Experience team that has built working satellites.
“I was not interested in trying to match the other teams in this competition,” Hoye said. “The way I viewed it, our education at Roanoke gave us a few strengths that we could really use to help stand out, rather than try and keep pace with the much larger and more established programs. We have a strong emphasis on theory and fundamentals, so that is where we devoted our time. We all shared a philosophy of keeping things as simple as possible.
“Of course, that sounds great and all, but what that really looked like was trying an idea to see where we can change to improve our design. We would iterate our design over and over again until we were happy with it.”
The design needed the strength to survive in deep space but had to be light and flexible enough to unfurl on its own out there — all while responding to NASA teams on the home planet.
To build the team, Hoye reached out to other Roanoke College physics and engineering professors, friends with similar academic interests and classrooms via 15-minute presentations. Ultimately, Slim Shady numbered 10, not including Le, who could only act in an advisory role.
Le, a second-year visiting professor at Roanoke, has a resume that includes two stints at NASA, where he did theoretical work exploring supermassive black holes, and three years as part of the James Webb Space Telescope team. He said that competitions like this one signal the beginning of work that could take up to 25 years to complete.
“An opportunity to work on a project like this is a great way for our students to face and solve real-world problems,” Le said. “When I explained about the project and the potential of how it can support future astronomers to search for exoplanets and planets that could be similar to Earth, the students’ excitement and their desire to tackle the project inspired me to work with them.”
Computer-assisted designs and seemingly endless calculations moved the project toward its finals-week deadline.
Among the first challenges the team faced was how to fold the starshade. The 100-meter diameter object that NASA might ultimately send into space would need to fold into a 14-by-2.5 meter compartment for liftoff, senior Alan Castellon said.
Making that fit was “difficult, to say the least,” Castellon said. “We did a lot of research on folding techniques currently implemented, like Miura folds [from origami], while also taking inspiration from daily objects like an umbrella or blooming flowers.”
Another skill, sewing, was crucial at the very end. Fortunately, two team members, Littlefield and Bryan Moctezuma-Vazquez, knew how.
“I actually taught myself how to sew during the 2020 pandemic as a pastime and since then have improved my skills through many sewing projects, mostly clothes for myself,” Littlefield said in a written exchange. “Being able to use artistic skills that I practice on the side for a project of my interest was awesome!”
They used thin black nylon as a substitute for more-expensive Kevlar, the most likely material for a future sunshade, and pulled in other team members to help with pinning and hand-sewing small pieces, she said.
Tony Saade, a junior, was involved early on, then was pulled away by another project’s requirements. Near the Slim Shady deadline, he found the team still at work one night.
“I could tell they were all tired, but I also saw how much work they had put in, so I wanted to do what I could to help them make the deadline,” Saade said.
Littlefield taught him how to sew by hand. The resulting starshade mockup doesn’t really look like a puffer jacket, but more like a 1-meter-wide black flower, star or snowflake.
Saade left the room about 2 a.m. on Dec. 15, deadline day. The project was due at 3 a.m., and Duncan, who led the calculations and finished the report, filed it on time.
Le said that the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, is working on a starshade for a space telescope, and the Slim Shady team was invited to visit the lab this summer to meet its mechanical engineering team and see how such a device is built at scale.
Hoye will have graduated by then, but he has high hopes going forward for Slim Shady and its puffer jacket. He hopes for a continued partnership between Roanoke College and NASA that can make the school’s physics program stand out.
“I did my best to lead and teach my team, and now is the really exciting part where I can see all the amazing things that they will do,” Hoye said. “My hope is that my effort will impact future students who I haven’t even met yet. I told my team that the starshade we designed might be built and sent off into space, where it may outlive every one of us. That is a legacy to be proud of, that shares our story of a small team that wanted to make a big splash. From that team, who knows what will happen next.”
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