LAFAYETTE, La. — Five students at UL Lafayette have caught NASA's attention.
At the university's Broussard Hall, many hours were spent researching, redesigning, and building a project that could potentially detect life on other planets and help us gain a better view of the space around us.
The team entered NASA's Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets Starshade challenge, winning $4,000 and placing third in the nationwide competition.
The challenge was based on a NASA project exploring "hybrid observatories," combining the capabilities of Earth's telescopes along with orbiting starshades. By using the flower-like design, it could enhance scientist's observation and study exoplanets, even beyond our own solar system.
Below is what the challenge was focused on:
- a conceptual design of the starshade using ‘first principles’ & fundamental structural analysis to ensure critical requirements are met, and
- building a 1:100 scale model (or larger) of the design using materials that could be scaled up on a NASA mission
But what is a starshade? A starshade is a space structure that helps minimize bright starlight, helping telescopes with better views of distant planets. By studying these distant Earth-like planets, we can gain more insight to our own planet, its history and potentially its future.
KATC stopped by UL's campus to speak with one of the brains behind the project and met Landon Degeytaire, a sophomore in mechanical engineering. He said this research could be helpful for future generations.
"I think it's really important because Earth is not going to be here forever, and we need to be able to look into the solar system, into our galaxy, and just find other things and other places to go if need be," says Degeytaire. "It's important for the future to know what's out there."
Another member, UL Physics major David Silva, feels that participating in the challenge has shown them the possibility of other livable planets.
"On those exoplanets, if you see oxygen, we can get the spectrum of those planets. If you see things like oxygen, you can tell if this could be a habitable planet or if this planet has life on it, and that’s the main function of this research,” Silva said.
Harley Hardy, another Physics major and team member, was pleased to learn they won third place and stressed the importance of being able to see the universe better to learn more about other planets and, at the same time, our own.
"In order for us to see other opportunities out in space, we need to know what’s is out there, and it's really hard to see what is out there because it's so far away, it means that we are probably going to see a lot more planets out there that are more inhabitable that we think of or know of as of right now, ” he says.
The team tells KATC that the win would not be possible without the support of Yasmeen Qudsi from Mechanical Engineering for help with the structural analysis calculations and also the American Institute of Physics, who was the organizer of the challenge on behalf of NASA. This project was also run by the Department of Physics.
