Small Satellites for Secondary Students (or ‘S4’) fills an important missing link in NASA’s educational pipeline between Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) and sounding rocket flights conducted by graduate students at research institutes. Through the S4 program, students and educators gain experience soldering and assembling payloads, building rockets, recording and analyzing scientific data.
S4 is a partnership between the Education and Public Outreach group at Sonoma State University, Tripoli Rocket Association’s AeroPac prefecture and the National Association of Rocketry.
Educators are able to build experimental payloads to fly on tethered weather balloons and/or rockets, enabling students to participate in the thrill of experimental design and implementation. We have created a hardware platform and software libraries, documented in our educator’s guide and associated videos. This website provides access to additional resources for the S4 community, including blog posts, links to software libraries, electrical schematics and part lists.
Currently Available S4 Resources:
- Educators Guide (PDF 8.78 MB) (Draft 6/28/13)
- Educators Guide Supplement (PDF 490 kB) (Draft 03/18/14)
- Software – Download the latest stable versions of our libraries, sketches, and supporting applications.
- Hardware – Where to buy the components to build your own S4 Payload.
- Presentations – Download the powerpoints and resources from the training.
- Source – Get access to our source files to modify the S4 project to your needs (advanced)
Our general contact information can be found at http://epo.sonoma.edu/group/.
Are there any S4 activities in Washington State? I am interested in working with students and educators on S4 in the Seattle area.
Hi Anthony, and thanks for commenting. As of now I don’t know what activity there is in Washington, if any. The best thing to do would be to contact the science teachers at local schools and see if they have any sort of airborne science programs, if they know of any, and if not if they’d like to start some. We’re trying to keep all of our hardware and instructions available for anyone who would like to jump in. Between this and TARC, there are a lot of options for introducing students to hands on projects.
Anthony, I am in Bellevue, teach STEM electives and would like to look further into S4. I would like to chat with you.