NASA Undergraduate Student Instrument Project

The NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has released an Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP) Educational Flight Opportunity (EFO) to solicit U.S. university proposals to develop an Earth or space science payload that will fly on a NASA suborbital vehicle, such as a sounding rocket, balloon, aircraft, or commercial suborbital reusable launch vehicle. The student team will be multidisciplinary and include undergraduate students from all disciplines including engineering, science, humanities, business, art, and other fields. Proposals to NASA are due April 5, 2013 with selections announced by May 10, 2013 and project initiation in September, 2013. The chosen experiments are planned to be flown starting June 2014. The call for proposals can be obtained through the following link:

http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?mode=VIEW&oppId=212633

            The Department of Mechanical Engineering at UMD is organizing a team to submit a proposal to study boiling heat transfer in the low-gravity environment provided by NASA’s Vomit Comet, an aircraft that produces near-zero gravity environments by flying approximately parabolic flight paths. A select number of students should be able to fly with the experiment.

Students interested in participating should attend an information session that will be held on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 5:30 PM in room 3106 of Glenn Martin Hall. Additional information or questions can be obtained by sending email to one of the contacts below:

Corey Cruttenden, ccrutten@terpmail.umd.edu

Jungho Kim, kimjh@umd.edu