VNR: Students, staff and faculty head to NASA launch of UH satellite
University of Hawaiʻi at MānoaLink to video and sound: https://go.hawaii.edu/nZc
***VOSOT script below for consideration***
WHAT: A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa team traveling to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch NASA launch the Hyperspectral Thermal Imager (HyTI) satellite that they designed and built.
WHO: Undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff from UH Mānoa Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP)
WHEN: Thursday, March 21, 10:55 a.m. HST
WHERE: Kennedy Space Center in Florida
HOW TO WATCH: The launch will be live streamed on NASA TV.
WHY: The students gained valuable hands-on experience designing and building the HyTI satellite, equipped with onboard data processing capabilities that will deliver high-resolution thermal images, surpassing the capabilities of current sensors.
ADDITIONAL DETAILS:
- The HyTI satellite, officially owned by NASA and operated by the Hawaiʻi Space Flight Laboratory, was selected in 2019 as part of NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative, under the Educational Launch of Nanosatellites program.
- The project's focus is to gather valuable data for understanding Earth's surface processes, including volcanic activity, wildfires and soil moisture levels.
- The images captured by the satellite will enable scientists and disaster response managers to analyze and respond to environmental events with precision and speed.
- Scheduled to launch aboard the SpX-30 Dragon CRS-2 commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), deployment from the ISS is expected in May. The mission duration is estimated to be one year.
VIDEO B-ROLL: trt 1:03
SOUNDBITES:
Robert Wright, UH HIGP director (:12)
“It'll be great to watch it. Launches are amazing to witness. We're taking a bunch of the team including some of the undergraduate students and graduate students over there to see it, and they'll see their work blast off into space.”
Wright (:14)
“We have a couple of volcanoes here within the state which regularly erupt. And the kind of data that HyTI will collect will be useful to study the eruptions that happen in the future within the state of Hawaiʻi itself.”
Piper Kline, UH mechanical engineering student (:07)
“I'm very excited about the launch. I'll be watching it live here and yeah, it will be very cool to see something that we worked on going to space in a couple of days.”
VOSOT script
INTRO
Happening tomorrow, a team from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa will see a satellite they created launch into space.
VO
Students gained valuable hands-on experience designing and building the Hyperspectral Thermal Imager satellite or HyTI (Hai-Tai) satellite. It’s equipped with onboard data processing capabilities that will deliver high-res thermal images. The images will help scientists to analyze and respond to environmental events with precision and speed.
SOT
(Piper Kline, UH mechanical engineering student)
<“I'm very excited about the launch. I'll be watching it live here and yeah, it will be very cool to see something that we worked on going to space in a couple of days.”>
(Robert Wright, UH HIGP director)
<“We have a couple of volcanoes here within the state which regularly erupt. And the kind of data that HyTI will collect will be useful to study the eruptions that happen in the future within the state of Hawaiʻi itself.”>
VO
The launch is scheduled for tomorrow at 10:55 a.m. Hawaii Time and will be streamed live on NASA TV.