San Gabriel Valley : GAMMA RAY GOOF
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Caltech students in Pasadena labored for four years on a trash-can-size container to detect gamma rays, a project so sophisticated that it was to fly on next month’s space shuttle mission.
Project aborted.
NASA, they say, broke it.
“You could see this big crack on the device that looked like the Mercedes-Benz symbol,” said Al Ratner, a recent Caltech graduate who was the project’s head mechanical engineer.
While who is at fault remains in dispute, the students are repairing the device for a shuttle mission sometime next year.
The undergraduate group, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, brought the $180,000 project to Cape Canaveral, Fla., in May for leak testing. It was there that NASA engineers put enough pressure on the device to fracture its lid in three places.
“Better it broke on the ground than in space,” a NASA spokeswoman said.
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