Co-curricular

Over the moon - school's role in SpaceX rocket

IMAGINE creating a little something in Science that will end up in space. Such is the reality for these space-centric St George's students who are participating in Binar Space WA's co-curricular spacecraft program at Curtin University.

Our Year 8-10 students are building a small payload for a satellite that will be launched into space on a SpaceX rocket in the near future. Science teacher Mr Thomas Dempers initiated our school's involvement during the last summer holidays to "enrich and extend our science students'', adding our budding scientists to a small number of WA schools all working independently with a gigantic goal. Mr Ian Thompson and Mr Richard Truong have also helped. 

During co-curricular sessions after school on Tuesdays, our students have been crafting a device that will help collect data from lower earth orbit to analyse the interactions and relationships of Earth’s magnetosphere, atmosphere and space time curvature. 

"Our idea is quite ambitious”, says participant Zara Jones (pictured below with her father, Alistair, at the Binar Space WA Launch Event Day in Northbridge earlier this week). "The feeling of knowing that something I am helping to make is going to be in space is so surreal.'' 

Zara continues: "The Binar X Co-Curricular program, run by Mr Dempers, with help from Mr Truong, is something the school has been fortunate enough to be chosen for. It has allowed for me and a group of students to work on a satellite payload that will be sent into Lower Earth Orbit with Curtin University on a Space X rocket." 

"These past few months we have been working really hard on our mission concept and have decided on investigating the interactions between the Earth’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and space time curvature,'' Zara said.

"Recently a few of our group members went to Curtin University for our mission concept review presentation, where we shared our ideas with stakeholders and how we plan to execute our mission in front of the Binar X team, engineers, professors, and scientists. We got the opportunity to talk to and meet so many incredible people and gain some useful feedback for our mission as well as meeting students from other schools who are also involved in the program. 

 "We can’t wait to work on and see our experiment be sent to space and released from the International Space Station over the next few years.

Zara has also been interviewed by the digital news-site WA Today.

 “For us, this is super exciting as to our knowledge, this experiment has not been done before in a cube satellite, small payload system, especially not by a group of high school students,” Zara told WA Today.

“I have gotten to learn so much, and it has also inspired me to hopefully study mechatronic engineering after I finish high school.” 

Watch this space.

Mrs Lisa Quartermain

Marketing and Community Engagement Manager