By Niki Tavakoli ’27
Astronomy Club has an ambitious schedule planned for the 2024-2025 school year. Aiming for frequent meetings, they plan to host a mixture of meetings for experienced astronomers, lectures on cool astronomy topics, casual meetings for interested beginners, get-togethers using Andover’s small telescopes, and meetings where club members can compete in the MIT BeaverWorks Build a CubeSat Challenge.
The ultimate goal of the Build a CubeSat Challenge is to build a fully functioning satellite as a team. The board of astronomy club has begun working on the project: the first step is to participate in a course to learn the coding and software-related skills necessary to construct a satellite, hardware skills like learning about the cameras necessary to observe the stars, and the physical mechanics behind how the satellite moves in space. After the course is completed, MIT organizers will determine whether participants are officially accepted to compete in the challenge, and they will send all the materials necessary to begin building a small, fully functioning satellite at Andover.
The board has worked hard to ensure the whole club can participate in this challenge, from registering over the summer to planning out how the whole club can collaborate on the project. They hope to use meetings as a collaborative work time for students to work on the satellite until the project is completed. Although there aren’t many astronomy-related competitions for high schoolers, the club plans to continue their engineering endeavors, with hopes to construct a fully functioning refracting telescope in the future if this satellite goes well.
Read more articles like this in our Fall 2024 Issue!
