KatoLaunchSquad

When we met today, we organized our team into several tasks: Morgan and Jordan will be taking the lead on creating the Outreach Report Presentation. We linked the Twitter and Instagram accounts.   Morgan and Emily S. will work on social media Jordan and Morgan start creating a list of microgravity fun facts for Microgravity Mondays Emily S. will be drawing a team logo Ben, Sam, and Zachary worked on the SLED design Cooper worked on data analysis today Here is the collection of 'stuff' from NASA that we will use to create our launcher!

This email says it all! It's not everyday that the phone rings and it says "US GOV" on the caller ID! Now - work to be done!!

It's time to get our proposal submitted!  Our team has used the 'divide and conquer' approach to manage the writing process.  There are several sections of the application that have needed to be developed. Some have worked on creating our social media presence.  Others have created a plan to share our experience after the trip, if we're accepted,  with our community.  Another group worked on creating a lesson plan to use with students.  A group developed sketches of our system and a technical description of how it will work. We intend to create code with an Arduino device - but we have yet to learn how to do that. Here are the documents as they are ready to go into NASA! Each school's administration has written a letter of support and we're ready to press SUBMIT!

We need a name! After much exploration, we settled on calling ourselves the KatoLaunchSquad . Our initial presentation is due to NASA by mid-December.  We're working on assembling lots of writing to explain our concept as we develop it. Once we get the proposal in, one of our next goals will be to develop our social media presence and to create a logo. We also discovered that the pucks were using are available locally - so we'll pick up a few to experiment with.

In mid November, 2017, our team began to form.  We met together and began to review the proposal guidelines provided from NASA.  Bottom line - we are to create a satellite launching mechanism from a 'box of junk' provided by NASA! We brainstormed several ideas and began to imagine how we might launch our 'hover puck' with this random assortment of supplies.  The team met several days after school - and even spent a Sunday afternoon in the lab experimenting with materials to see what might get the job done. The initial concept came down to a slide track mechanism that used the elasticity of rubber tubing to store energy.  Here is the initial prototype: We've decided to use a tool called GroupMe to communicate as a team.