"The multi-pronged mission of the Enterprise In Space project is to design, build, fly, and eventually return to Earth an orbiter containing student experiments. This project will be a tribute to the many great visionaries of science and science fiction. It will demonstrate and pioneer new technologies while inspiring and encouraging space enterprise. It will promote the development of educational curricula and activities contributing to related future endeavors in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). This project engages and inspires the next generation – all ages and walks of life – by igniting a renewed interest in space exploration and development."
Project currently active at Yerkes!
Details on the Drop Tower status are downstairs.
We also worked on researching possible Enterprise Centers for Excellence, partnerships with universities and corporations to help coordinate experiment competitions for the Enterprise orbiter mission, which will transport over 100 student-designed experiments to space. Our goal wass to have at least one in each state in the US, and all the involved countries involved in the ISS: Russia, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and The United Kingdom. In addition, we hoped to include Romania, India, China, South Korea, Brazil, and Chile. At the end of the summer, we had found 120 possible locations within the US, including every state, and 130 foreign locations in 52 countries, including all the target ones, for a total of 250 locations.
We plan to use the vacuum tube in the 41" to make a drop tower. The fall time would be about 1.5s.
Possible student projects:
Our project during the summer of 2016 was to determine the necessary tasks and costs to convert the Yerkes WCE Vacuum tube into a microgravity droptower. Currently, the covers and lens have been removed so that items can be dropped through the tube. So far, tests show that the cushioning at the bottom of the tube will have to be very robust to stop plunging objects. More work would have been done on the tube, but structural maintenance work here at Yerkes cut off access to the 41" dome, where the top of the tube is, for well over a month.
In the meantime, we continued looking into deceleration mechanisms and designing a release system.
The 2018 Drop tower files are on the stars server on the FileManager under stars/Research/DropTower/2018 Drop Tower Files.