Librarians in Space!

The staff at CfA's Wolbach Library and Information Center are working with astrophysicists, engineers, and data scientists to build a new spacecraft as the first step in creating the infrastructure needed to give everyone access to space.

CubeSats are small, inexpensive satellites that often piggyback on larger missions. These satellites have opened up space exploration to universities, high schools, and even amateur hobbyists. CfA staff are working to not only build a scientific mission using CubeSats but also to invent an innovative new infrastructure to encourage sharing data across the growing CubeSat community.

The Space Library will create an open source, ready-to-use, CubeSat data system, that will allow researchers to take time and money that would be spent on redeveloping data management plans and hardware and instead invest it in developing the science and instrumentation for each mission. The Space Library will also build a downlink network that will consist of dozens of off-the-shelf satellite listening posts at partner institutions across the world. This network will provide CubeSats much-needed time to download their observations while also giving educators and the public a common platform to access live data from space for a multitude of citizen science projects.

To link the Space Library team with the CubeSat community, they decided to design and build their own CubeSat. "Our librarians are amazing, and they love to get their hands dirty and actually make stuff!" says Dr. Henry Winter, an astrophysicist at the CfA working on the project.

However, building a CubeSat has a much more important purpose than satisfying their creativity. Being part of an "amateur" CubeSat effort, from start to finish, will embed the Space Library team in the CubeSat community in a way that no amount of interviews or meetings could. The process of designing, building, and hopefully flying a CubeSat will give the team a unique insight into the challenges and excitement experienced by CubeSat makers. These insights will be used to generate suggestions for improving workflows, and hopefully lead to strategies for seamlessly archiving information as part of the making process.

The Space Library CubeSat will monitor lightning flashes from space in order to connect the dots between lightning strikes and Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes or TGFs. TGFs were first detected coming from thunderstorms by the BATSE experiment on NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory in 1994. Later the RHESSI solar observing satellite detected about 50 of these events a day, yet the process that creates these intense bursts of energy is not understood. Librarians may be central to not only revolutionizing how data flows from space to the people who need it on earth, but also in providing the key data needed to solve the 22-year-old mystery of Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes.

You can support this project and find out more by visiting its webpage at the Knight Foundation's News Challenge site (bit.ly/space_lib). Watch the video, leave a comment, and if you like what you see, click on the heart icon to applaud the project.