WEST HILLS : Science Students Turn Their Attention to Heavens

When Melissa Clary was a little girl, she did not know that a shooting star was really a meteor--a piece of space dust burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Now she uses meteors to help explore space.

Using a solar-powered ham radio, computers and a satellite antennae, Clary and five other students in teacher Dave Reeves’ Earth science class at Chaminade College Preparatory School monitored meteors to help learn how satellites function in space--even as they discover that they like science, after all.

The work involves WeberSat, a science satellite in an orbit 1,287 miles above the Earth. It was designed by students at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and was launched in 1990.

Clary’s group recently compared meteor activity on Nov. 11, 1992, and March 8 of this year to determine if the WeberSat’s meteor impact sensor was being affected when the satellite passed from the dark to the sunlit side of the Earth. The transition often causes satellites to experience “thermal creaking” as the sun’s warmth makes them expand slightly.

WeberSat technicians, who supplied the team with data and helped provide direction for its research, feared the meteor readings from their satellite during the night to day transition were untrustworthy because of the thermal creaking.

“What we determined was that the readings were not the result of thermal creaking. They were the result of significant (meteor) shower activity,” said student Chris Shubeck, 17. The other students on the WeberSat project include John Clark, 18, and Sarina Harding and Mark Walsh, both 17.

Robert Argyle, staff programmer for WeberSat, is hoping that the students’ project helps clear up the questions about the satellite.

“It has been a matter of some argument here,” Argyle said from Utah. “If they have some data that can convince other people here that we are getting impacts, it would be wonderful.”

Most importantly, the project helped students appreciate science.

“It’s easier to understand than a textbook,” Walsh said.

But that does not stop some students from holding on to some old beliefs about the heavens.

“When I was little, I would see a shooting star and make a wish,” Clary said. “Now I know it’s a meteor, but I still make a wish.”