Washington University in St. Louis electrical engineering students in EE 480, however, will have a different twist to their spring semester project: If all goes well, the fruits of their labors will be launched on a NASA rocket into space in June of this year.

Electrical Engineering 480 is an advanced undergraduate course taught by Donald L. Snyder, Ph.D., the Samuel C. Sachs Professor of Electrical Engineering, and William H. Smith, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts and Sciences.

This semester, the two professors from different Schools have shared their highly acclaimed imaging expertise with the 13 students to help them prepare a compact package roughly five inches in diameter and seven inches tall.

The package will be incorporated into a canister placed within a NASA rocket's nose cone and launched from Wallops Island on Virginia's coast. Inside will be a sophisticated hyperspectral imager and supporting electronics and computer equipment for image and data acquisition.

The students, working in groups of two and three, have been responsible for designing, implementing and testing the sensor package and its supporting software.

After the launch in June, the rocket is expected to reach an elevation of about 200 miles and land about 200 miles east of Wallops Island in the Atlantic Ocean. NASA will retrieve the package and return it to Washington University where the imaging data will be analyzed.

Even though the students will have a final EE 480 grade by mid-May, they'll probably feel like they're carrying an incomplete until the package is returned and the results analyzed.

Smith is the inventor of the hyperspectral imager, called a Digital Array Scanned Interferometer, or DASI (pronounced like the flower). This records digital images much like a camera, except that it can produce image data resolved into more than 100 different spectral bands.

By comparison, a typical color camera and the human visual system can only resolve the visible spectrum into three broad overlapping bands -- red, green and blue. Hyperspectral data, as it is known, can be used to identify and discriminate objects in a scene using highly detailed color information not discernible by the human visual system,

DASI represents a rapidly emerging technology used for remote sensing and assessment of agricultural crops to aid farmers, mineral outcroppings, ocean reefs, the Earth's atmosphere, the planets and other astronomical objects.

According to Smith and Snyder, NASA has flown the DASI on various aircraft, including a solar-powered remotely controlled vehicle, to make various observations.

Smith is developing a proposal to NASA to include the imager on a mission to Pluto and beyond the solar system to look back at the Earth in a search for life in the only place we know it to exist.

"A way to determine if we know how to find life is to show that Earth can be detected by a space craft moving farther and farther away from Earth," explained Smith. "Eventually, to the imager, Earth looks like a planet around another star. It merges into the star and becomes a single point."

The image of Earth acquired by the DASI eventually can be compared to that of another distant planet outside the solar system. If these images are similar, there could be a cause to believe that the distant planet is similar to Earth.

The mission is intended to develop methods for the search for life outside the solar system The launch of the student rocket package is a first step into space for DASI technology.

Snyder said that there's more riding on the NASA rocket than the DASI and the students' semester grades.

"The DASI has not yet been tested for durability under the stress of rocket launching," Snyder said. "The class project is the first such test, so, in addition to being an unusual educational opportunity, the project is one that is integral to the space program and NASA's future plans."

The information the DASI obtains on this sub-orbital flight will come entirely from within the canister the students are building. Inside the canister there will be an image formed using light-emitting diodes and fiber-optic lines. This will form a test pattern during the flight. The DASI camera will get about 100 images of the test pattern.

"We anticipate that the DASI images of the test pattern will remain stable throughout this first flight," said Smith.

Snyder said the course is designed to ensure that all students interact with each other, so the end result is very much a "team" effort.

"Each of the five groups of students work on a specific subsystem, but the groups interact strongly because the subsystems must work together to accomplish the mission," he said. "The students have benefited greatly from a number of people who've become associated with the project."

Jasenka Benac, a senior electrical engineering major, has spent the semester working with classmate Dawei Wang in a two-person sub-group specializing on the power supply, the test pattern and the initiation transducer, an electronics component that initiates the data collection.

"This class was different from any other design class in that it pulled everything I've learned together, from different sources, Bena said. "It gives you a sense of how things work in the real world. We started from scratch and did everything from research to decision-making, and we had a real deadline.

"In most design classes, you're either right or wrong with the design, but in this case, there was no model, so you're more on your own in finding the right answer. I learned much more than electrical engineering -- including optics and mechanical engineering. It's been a great experience."

For more than two years, Smith, Snyder and electrical engineering colleague Daniel R.Fuhrman, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical engineering, have collaborated on a DASI project sponsored by the Boeing-McDonnell Foundation and performed in the Electronic Systems and Signals Research Laboratory.

In many ways, the EE 480 project is an outgrowth of the research supported by Boeing, which also sponsors a graduate student collaborative research program with Washington University students and Boeing researchers.

Snyder cited several associates of the DASI project as being particularly helpful to students and teachers.

Marc Murbaugh of NASA, Ames, is managing the rocket flight and serving as a consultant to students on rocket-related points; Michael A. Swartwout, adjunct professor of mechanical engineering, is serving as a consultant to students about thermodynamics and other mechanical engineering issues for their design; Dan Rode, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering, is assisting with optical sources; Mike Antoniak, a graduate EE student, is volunteering his expertise on microcomputers and electronic system design; and Paul Dowkontt, an electrical engineering research associate in the physics department, volunteered his expertise on packaging electronics for space flight.

"Personally, I've found this project and collaboration very rewarding," said Snyder. "Bill and I hope to do this again next year and hope to involve students from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, as well as EE students."

"When I learned of the EE senior project, it was clear that there was a natural fit between my desire to get a DASI into space quickly and the eager, intelligent efforts that this class of outstanding young engineers would make to bring it about," said Smith. "This 'voluntary' teaching in a department not my own has been the best-spent time I have enjoyed over the past decade."

Prof Smith's Work at Washington University in St. Louis

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