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Climate & Space Professor Aaron Ridley was recently interviewed for an article in MLive about the upcoming Michigan Bicentennial Archive's M-BARC project.
The University of Michigan is celebrating its 200th anniversary during 2017, and the students involved in the Michigan Bicentennial Archive wanted to do something different, an appropriately twenty-first century take on the traditional commemorative time capsule. And so, the M-BARC team set out to create the very first space-based time capsule.
Rather than burying a small trove of artifacts from 2017 somewhere on campus, the team is working to send their capsule into a 100-year orbit aboard a small satellite, or CubeSat. The spacecraft will orbit the Earth at an altitude of approximately 2100 kilometers.
From the article:
"'One of the fascinating things about this project is it is entirely student-driven,' said faculty lead Aaron Ridley, a professor in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering. 'We're here to support the students and give them advice when they ask for it, but we're not telling them 'you need to do this and this.' All of these students have put their heart and soul into this.'"
"The original concept for the team was to send the time capsule to the moon, an idea proposed by Thomas Zurbuchen, a former UM planetary science professor who is now head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate."
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