[music]
Fenway Park may be the home of Boston's most beloved team, but
another is about to steal some headlines.
This group consists of students from MIT and Harvard who are
getting the chance to build an instrument that will help NASA's
OSIRIS-REx spacecraft explore the asteroid Bennu.
This group of student scientists are building REXIS - the
Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer.
Its purpose is to collect and image X-rays coming from the
asteroid, to determine its elemental makeup and
distribution of elements across the surface.
Each student has a unique task on the project.
"I get to practice being a thermal engineer and honing my
thermal engineering skills." "My role is to work with the solar
x-ray monitor as well as some of the avionics side." "On a daily
basis I write test plans and assembly procedures." "I work on
the REXIS avionics system.
And what that is, is the electronics that take the x-ray
signals from the asteroid, and make sure they get back to the
ground for the scientists to process." "As systems engineer,
I'm responsible for making sure that all the different technical
disciplines come together - thermal, structures, avionics,
software - they all come together to make one working
instrument that meets our science requirements."
And making sure everything stays in check is Becky Masterson -
the REXIS instrument manager and the group's faculty supervisor.
"REXIS is an interesting instrument on OSIRIS-REx in that
we're a student collaboration experiment.
The goal here is to educate students, and the REXIS project
has been a fantastic way, you know, to do that.
Both undergrads and graduates go through this project and get a
real, a real-live view into what it is to build space hardware."
And building REXIS is an intense process with strict
contamination controls and elaborate software and hardware
testing.
And there's one thing every college student can relate to:
note-taking.
"On REXIS the reason that we have such careful procedures and
note-taking is that in the future if during an
environmental test or other integration activity we notice
an anomaly, we can try to trace it back to a root cause.
And if you have detailed notes it's easier to go back and
figure out what may have happened during assembly."
So what's the biggest challenge in building REXIS?
The answer may surprise you.
"Having students involved in REXIS has been a wonderful
experience; it's been an adventure.
One of the difficulties of it is that students are always coming
and going.
So you get a student in, they're here for a two years Masters and
they learn a lot, and they are doing great, and then they're
gone." So working on REXIS is a bit like riding the "T" in
Boston - some students going outbound some coming inbound.
But all are getting the same collective learning experience.
"So the biggest thing I've learned while working on REXIS
is really that instruments like this and spacecraft like
OSIRIS-REx are very, very complex.
It has a lot of dependencies, a lot of requirements, a lot of
relationships and a lot of design decisions that all impact
one another."
"REXIS provides a hands-on experience for students
to build flight hardware for a NASA mission, and that's
incredibly rare that as a student you can build something
that's going to fly in interplanetary space.
So this is like a lead in to a future career in NASA,
a future career in rocket science."
"That's exciting for me, I get a
kick out of thinking that, you know, these pieces that I am
touching and this assembly that I am building is actually what
is going to fly in space.
So I think that's pretty cool." And between Fenway and Boston's
other attractions, students must feel completely spoiled with
their social life, right?
"Yeah, well, I don't go out much (laughs).
I don't know (laughing).
What is there much to say? (Laughing)
Usually I have to work on REXIS."
So, while it's true
these students may strike out trying to find that perfect
balance between schoolwork, a social life, and working on
REXIS, as scientists they are hitting a home run for the
OSIRIS-REx team.