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UNM student Jacy Bitsoie found herself driving down Paseo del Norte, chasing a runaway balloon in the name of science.
“We were literally driving around north of Albuquerque, hoping to visually see the balloon come down or see the command module to fall with its parachute,” she said.
Bitsoie had been struggling with GPS issues with her summer balloon project before, but never to the point where she lost all contact with it. But a speaker had been installed earlier on the balloon, letting out an alarm loud enough for a family to hear the balloon land in their neighborhood.
“A family heard the speaker, called us because it had our phone number on it and we were able to retrieve the command module that way,” she said.
Bitsoie was one of nine undergraduate students this summer who launched and tracked high-altitude balloons into near space, the area between 65,000 and 350,000 feet above sea level that includes the stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere.
Bitsoie said she was required to test radio systems and other electronics for the rigors of near space. She said the project opened her eyes to various types of engineering.
“Going in as a civil engineer major, working with space dynamics and working with electronics was something completely different than from what I was used to,” Bitsoie said. “It gave me an opportunity to work on projects outside my field and it made me realize that I do want to be a civil engineer. It just confirmed my passion.”
Students worked with the Configurable Space Microsystems Innovations & Applications Center, a space electronics center at UNM, as interns for the University’s new Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program. The STEP internship program was designed to help undergraduate engineering and computer science students gain hands-on experience in their career field.
UNM’s COSMIAC research center developed a new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) satellite ring, a device that carries satellites into outer space, and a new high-altitude balloon project, which focuses on radio wave tests held in near space.
This summer was the first partnership between COSMIAC and STEP, and 46 engineering students participated in the paid internship.
In order to be eligible for this internship, students must attend at least two of the three advisory mentorship seminars, where students can talk to UNM faculty members and advisers about future classes and possible company internship opportunities.
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COSMIAC Chief Research Officer Steven Suddarth said the STEP program aims to give students a hands-on approach to engineering, an opportunity that a classroom setting won’t offer. He said students have the opportunity to deal with real-world research problems, rather than practice on problems that are set up in the classroom.
“Classroom problems by nature are set up to be not that easy in that minds of a student, but they’re terribly easy compared to a lot of real-world research problems in a sense that they typically work out to an answer that’s usually verifiable,” he said. “Real-world problems don’t tend to work out that way.”
From errors with software tools, to mistakes made in documentation, Suddarth said the undergraduate interns faced technical issues throughout the summer.
“There’s something there that the students learn that they didn’t anticipate,” he said. “When they start out their summer, their planning process is they’re going to lay out that step and that step and that step. They get into it and realize they have to work outside the plan.”
Student Preston Edwards participated in the ESPA ring project, which focused on maximizing the space used on the ring by increasing the number of satellites the ring can hold from six to seven. Edwards said the internship helps students get ahead of those who only have classroom experience.
“I think it’s way more important in today’s economy to have actual experience in the field rather than solely just a degree,” Edwards said.
COSMIAC deputy director Craig Kief said the STEP internship program works well because the program focuses on integrating different types of engineering and science students.
“You had physics people, civil engineers, electrical engineers, you had mechanical engineers, all of them working together toward a common set of projects and that was probably the coolest part of the summer activity; just the intermingling of these different people and projects,” Kief said.
