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Get the most interesting and important stories from the University of Pittsburgh.NASA recruited Pitt to track the Artemis II mission
As NASA’s Artemis II mission got underway this week, students and faculty from the Swanson School of Engineering, with support from Pitt Space, brought their ham radios to the roof of Benedum hall to tune in to the Orion spacecraft.
Pitt was one of just eight universities chosen by NASA to determine whether academic or commercial groups, or individuals, had the capabilities to track the spacecraft as it went on its record-breaking 248,655-mile flight around the moon and back.
“It’s really an honor that we get to work on the project,” said Sawyer Mervis. He and Jake Wendt are both senior electrical engineering students and members of the Panther Amateur Radio Club (PARC).
The club designed and built the equipment for the project with support from faculty, including Juan Mandfredi, professor of math in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, along with Samuel Dickerson, associate professor, vice chair for education and the director of the computer engineering undergraduate program, and Mark Kahrs, an instructor, both in the Swanson School’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Their radios were a necessary component of the project, but to bring the technology into the 21st century, the team took advantage of Pitt Digital’s partnership with Anthropic.
“Finding that signal is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Dickerson said. “We were able to use Claude so that we knew when we needed to point the antenna to hopefully catch the astronauts’ signal.”
And that’s how they found themselves on the roof of Benedum with a parabolic antenna pointing just above UPMC Presbyterian. They could only spot the signal when they had a fairly direct line to it. It turned out their best chance was from about 4 a.m. to 6:30 a.m.
“We hoped it wouldn’t be in that direction,” Wendt said, looking at UPMC Presbyterian. The physical structure of the building might interfere with the tiny signal coming from Orion.
Still, NASA had provided the exact frequency on which the craft would be broadcasting so the team would be able to recognize the signal when they came across it. The next step is to analyze their data to see if that signal can be teased out from all the noise.
Mandfredi, credited by Dickerson for keeping PARC active in the city where the first commercial AM radio station — KDKA — was switched on, was thrilled for the students.
“Twenty years from now, they may not remember who taught a course, but they will remember the experience of being here on the roof at four in the morning, trying to copy Orion,” he said.
Photography courtesy of Samuel Dickerson