CU-Boulder student who worked on instrument aboard New Horizons anxious for
spacecraft to reach Pluto
July 13, 2015
Beth Cervelli
When the New Horizons spacecraft encounters Pluto early tomorrow morning
several CU-Boulder alumni will realize a decade full of dreams and no one more so
than Beth Cervelli.
Cervelli, who is a flight software engineer at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for
Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, is one of a number of CU-Boulder students
who more than a decade ago built the Student Dust Collector instrument aboard
New Horizons.
CUT 1 “It’s very surreal because when you work on this and you know that we are
going to have to wait 10 whole years to get the pictures back but then it finally is
that 10 years. It’s hard to believe that all that time has passed and we’re still there
and everything is still working. (:18) It’s very cool to have been a part of that especially for Pluto. This is probably the one and only chance in our lifetime that
we’ll be flying by this dwarf planet.” (:29)
Cervelli was an undergraduate in 2003 earning a software engineering degree when
she helped create the flight and ground based software for the instrument – one that
has been collecting samples of space dust since the craft blasted off for Pluto in 2006.
CUT 2 “The job of the Student Dust Counter is to count dust particles as we travel
from the Earth to Pluto and beyond. It is basically a plastic film that sits on the
outside of the spacecraft in the direction the spacecraft is moving - basically like the
windshield. (:15) So as the spacecraft moves it flies through dust and those dust
particles impact out detector and the electronics pick up those signals and store
them. And then once a year we send those signals to the spacecraft and the
spacecraft sends them down to the ground.” (:29)
The dust collector can only detect the size of the dust not the compositions, adds
Cervelli. But the fact that students built this instrument and that it is still working
and working well is what she finds amazing.
CUT 3 “It’s amazing. I mean we knew what we were doing, we thought it would
work but it actually is working and it’s been running for nine years without so much
as a hic up. (:16) And just to know that we were able to accomplish that - that is
amazing to me.” (:21)
New Horizons will have its closest encounter with Pluto tomorrow at 5:50 a.m.
Mountain Daylight Time and you can bet that Cervelli and a host of CU-Boulder
alumni who worked on the dust collecting instrument will be waiting for news from
NASA that the spacecraft has safely arrived.
-CU-