MECC hosts advance event for linkup with space station
WISE — The International Space Station is scheduled to touch down at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise today, at least in the telecommunicative sense.
About 3,000 school kids from Wise County and surrounding school divisions will be treated to a live audiovisual communications linkup with astronauts aboard the space station beginning at 9:25 a.m., as well as hearing presentations from currently earth-bound astronauts and others at the UVa-Wise Convocation Center.
On Wednesday, a preview of today’s main event was held at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, along with some of the displays that will be at UVa-Wise. They include a space suit once worn by astronaut Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin Jr., a moon rock collected by astronaut Edgar Mitchell during the 1971 lunar mission of Apollo 14, and an inflatable mockup of a Mars rover.
Aldrin piloted the lunar module during the Apollo 11 mission — the historic first mission to land men on the moon — and was the second human to set foot on the moon following in the steps of mission commander Neil Armstrong. The Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the moon on July 20, 1969.
Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the moon — and collect lunar samples, including the one on display in Wise County — during the Apollo 14 mission.
On Wednesday, Dr. Richard Phillips, MECC’s vice president of academic and student services, welcomed a collection of that college’s students, a contingent of school children and host of curious locals to the preview event at MECC’s Goodloe Center. He introduced guest speakers that included a core team member of engineers who designed and built Robonaut 2 (R2), a humanoid robot now aboard the International Space Station.
Phillips said the unique event now taking place in Wise County provides students and all residents with “a vision of the cosmos to humanity,” and guest presenters such as R2’s Adam Sanders should be viewed by students as role models.
Sanders provides a hometown touchstone for tomorrow’s space explorers.
He graduated from Powell Valley High School in 2002 — and took dual-enrollment courses at MECC while attending the Big Stone Gap high school — before going on to serve as the robotics system development engineer to help build the world’s most advanced dexterous humanoid robot now aboard the space station.
R2 is a joint venture of General Motors and NASA. Sanders currently works as the lead software architect at Euclid Innovations in North Carolina.
On Wednesday, Sanders said his appearance at MECC’s preview event “really brings back memories” of taking dual-enrollment courses at the college during his high school years. A major lesson MECC math professors taught him was they weren’t simply requiring him to solve complex math equations, Sanders said, but “how to solve problems” in the larger sense.
As a member of the core team that produced R2 — for a mental image of R2, think C-3PO of “Star Wars” movie fame, probably minus the comically exasperated personality — Sanders said the project’s goals include pushing forward the technology to make humanoid robotics a future scenario closer than most could only imagine.
There will be a time when humanoid robots will work together with humans. Because people can spend only so much time, currently, in space and do only so much during that constrained time frame, Sanders said humanoid robots such as R2 can begin to take care of the more mundane tasks required to operate a spacecraft such as the International Space Station.
The first task for R2 aboard the space station, he said, is pretty much what is required of human astronauts, and that is to become accustomed to a weightless environment.
Once all systems prove up to that, Sanders said R2 will manipulate a “task board” equipped with buttons and switches and other bells and whistles. Then R2 will get tried out on the actual International Space Station tasks, he said.
Sanders said while R2 can’t think for itself — something Hollywood robots do quite well, at least in the fictional sense — it can “feel, see and communicate with other computers.”
Last year, R2 developers even proposed a project to land a bipedal R2 — that’s a walking-around version — on the moon. Sanders said “Project M,” as the proposal is now dubbed, could be achieved in 1,000 days.
“It is possible. We have the technology,” he said. “We just need someone to hit the ‘Go’ button.”
Sanders challenged school children to “find your passion” and pursue it.
“The great thing about a small town,” he said, are the endless opportunities to “be a pioneer” by finding something nobody has ever before tried, let alone achieved, “and make it happen.”
Other presenters at MECC’s preview included Virginia Tech graduate Amanda Cutright, a NASA engineer who works on projects related to exploratory probes to Mars including the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment and Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, referred to in the space trade as development of “space brakes.”
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