Student Science Project to Go Out of This World

Csaba Petre, a teenage physics whiz, figured the next best thing to going on a space shuttle mission was sending a homemade experiment on one.

So the Agoura High School sophomore gathered a team from the school’s physics club, which he founded as a freshman, to complete a project he thought of about a year ago: designing a mechanical resonator that works best without gravity.

NASA officials were impressed enough to pick the resonator as one of four student projects to travel aboard the shuttle in the next year.

Petre and his physics club buddies, seniors Neel Sachdev and Daniel Gruver and freshman Spencer Klein, will travel to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., on Saturday to prepare the experiment for space, with the help of NASA scientists and engineers.

“Once it’s ready, the experiment will go to the Kennedy Space Center for launch on the space shuttle,” NASA spokesman Keith Koehler said.

All of the boys’ expenses will be paid by the space agency, which will host daily lab work sessions during their weeklong stay, Koehler said.

The Agoura High boys are the only California students to win the 2001 NASA Student Involvement Program, a competition held annually to stimulate math, science, technology and geography excellence among students in grades three through 12.

Nearly 3,000 students from across the country submitted about 1,200 entries in five categories this year.

Three other experiments, all biology-related, will make the trip into space with the resonator, the only mechanical project selected.

“None of us really believed it when we heard we won,” said Petre, whose father, Peter, an electrical engineer at a Malibu laboratory, served as the group’s advisor.

A few years ago, Petre, 16, won in another category of the annual NASA contest, with a paper detailing an imaginary mission to Mars, complete with a manned rover and microscope to look for microfossils and bacteria.

That prize included a week at the NASA space center in Huntsville, Ala.

But launching a project on the shuttle was the ultimate goal, he said. Realizing that it would have been virtually impossible to do alone, Petre asked for volunteers at a physics club meeting.

Klein, 14, immediately signed up when he heard about the space connection.

“It was a nice dream,” he said.

It took the team nearly six months and more than 700 hours to get the resonator working as a frequency filter to clean radio and other types of signals. On a radio, the resonator allows the listener to tune into one station by filtering out signals from others.

“It’s a very sophisticated project for kids this age,” said Peter Petre, who worked closely with the group. “It features very advanced physics.”

The resonator measures 5 by 5 inches and has a square frame made of aluminum. A wheel at the top spins and pushes a rod back and forth, moving the springs at the center of the frame.

The first prototype was made of brass; then the boys made a model out of Legos. Finally, the aluminum model was built to meet NASA’s weight limit of six pounds.

“Legos were perfect because they have moving parts and we needed a working model,” said Sachdev, 18, who designed the Lego model.

Besides boning up on complex mathematical equations and the effects of gravity on sound filters, the students said they also learned about teamwork.

“That’s what I learned more than anything else,” Gruver, 17, said. “You have to stick to it. You can’t just walk out, and that’s how it is in the real world.”