Space Systems Design Studio

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Outreach

Contact Us

To contact us about coordinating outreach activities please contact Laura Jones at llj7 (at) cornell.edu

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Past Outreach Events

Outreach Activity	Age Group	Date
Sub-Zero Science at Ithaca’s (Sciencenter)	Elementary School Campers	July - Aug. 2010
Sub-Zero Science at Ithaca’s (Sciencenter )	Open to the Public	July 31, 2010
Houston We've Had A Problem with (Expanding Your Horizons)	7th - 9th Grade Girls	April 24, 2010
Showtime! at Ithaca’s (Sciencenter)	Elementary School Students	April 03, 2010
Principles of Modern Engineering with (GRASSHOPR)	11th and 12th Grade Students	April 2010
Flux Pinning Demonstration with (Prospective Women's Day)	12th Grade Girls	October 2009

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Outreach Descriptions

Ithaca Sciencenter Presentations

Throughout the year, Ithaca's Scienceneter hosts scientifically-themed presentations that serve as a bridge between the scientific community and the public.

Our lab periodically gives presentations in this formum to demonstrate flux pinning and explain the applications of cryo science, especially as it relates to spacecraft.

The Sciencenter auditorium as people begin to arrive for the presentation	A demonstration of flux pinning was made more clear by projecting a webcam image on the screen.
Our group's presentation also includes background information on "cold" science.	The aftermath of freezing things with liquid nitrogen.

Houston, We've Had a Problem

Expanding Your Horizons is an annual conference held on Cornell's campus that seeks to teach middle- and high- school aged girls the principles of engineering and science via hands-on activities.

Our lab hosted a session that highlighted the difficulties of on-orbit construction, ground-to-orbit communication, and designing with limited information.

The students were first split into "ground" and "orbit" teams. The "ground control" was to design an engineering solution to a given problem.	Once the ground team modeled their solution with toothpicks and gumdrops, they had to communicate their design to their orbit team via Skype.
The orbit team, hindered by thick astronaut gloves, tried to construct the full-scale engineering solution developed by their ground team.	The orbit team relied on verbal feedback from their ground team, since they had no video feed of the ground team's design.

Principles of Modern Engineering

GRASSHOPR is a program that allows graduate students to develop a series of classes to teach in local schoools.

Our lab gave a flux pinning demonstration to a number of classes at a local high school, while discussing how a college-level engineering team works.

Prospective Women's Day

Prospective Women's Day is an event where high school students interested in Cornell's engineering program come to campus to see first-hand what Cornell has to offer.

Our lab group set up a table where we explained the basics of flux pinning and how it relates to our research.

We started off explaining the challenges that currently face spacecraft design, and the advantages of a modular spacecraft actuation system.	We then went on to demonstrate what exactly flux pinning is using a YBCO disk, liquid nitrogen, and a permanent magnet.
Besides the demo itself, we had a poster which explained the science behind flux pinning in a graphical manner.	Once our audience had seen what flux pinning was, we explained how we plan on implementing it in space to actuate spacecraft.

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