When the New Horizons spacecraft encountered Pluto early this morning, several CU-Boulder alumni realized a decade full of dreams and no one more so than Beth Cervelli.
Cervelli, who is a flight software engineer at CU-Boulder’s , or LASP, is one of a number of CU-Boulder alumni who more than a decade ago built the Student Dust Counter instrument aboard .
“It’s very surreal because you work on this and you know that we are going to have to wait 10 whole years to get the pictures back," Cervelli said. "It’s hard to believe that all that time has passed and we’re still there and everything is still working. 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.”
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.
“The job of the is to count dust particles as we travel from the Earth to Pluto and beyond," she said. "It is basically a plastic film that sits on the outside of the spacecraft in the direction the spacecraft is movingĚý - basically like the windshield. 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.”
The dust counter 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.
“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," Cervelli said. "And just to know that we were able to accomplish that - that is amazing to me.”
New Horizons had its closest encounter with Pluto at 5:50 a.m. on July 14.
Photo courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI).
