A team of engineering students from Hartselle High School may be able to look back in 15 to 20 years and take pride in having played a role in designing a payload for an exploratory mission to Titan, a distant moon marked by methane lakes.

Kim Pittman’s Engineering III class will be one of 13 DART 2-D2 teams from North Alabama to compete in a Critical Design Review conducted by a panel of NASA engineers on the UAH campus Saturday.

Four awards will be up for grabs, including the Best Original Poster and Best Booth Display. The top payload design, however, had a payoff of becoming a part of the future Titan space mission.

Representing Hartselle High in the competition are seniors Carson Clemons, Shawn McCulloch, Jackson Lemmons, Gavin Marsh, Kyle St. Amand and Todd Gibson.

The team received a thumps up signal from a group of onlookers during a dry run presentation it made at the school system’s central office on Wednesday.

Each team member will take part in the video presentation by speaking to different aspects of the payload design and fielded questions from the audience without hesitation.

Pittman said her students began searching for information about Titan and the  DART 2-D2 lander early on in the school year. They also were teamed up with UAH engineering students, who were working on the lander design, as a source of information. Other external help came from NASA and NOAA.

“The students worked pretty much on their own from start to finish,” said Pittman, “and one of life’s lessons they learned was that you have to be able to communicate with people you don’t know to be successful.

NASA’s objective in co-sponsoring the competition in cooperation with the University of North Alabama was to develop a lander and payload for the mission capable of measuring tidal changes on one of the lakes on Titan.

Working in cooperation with UNA’s lander team, the HHS team designed a cable, anchor

and payload that would be lowered into the methane lake to a depth of 30 meters. It was designed to receive a low level of power from the lander and measure the lake’s pressure, temperature and acceleration due to gravity. Components in the payload had to be corrosive-poof, lightweight and able to withstand temperatures ranging from -420ºF to 300ºF.

Pre-engineering courses were first offered at Hartselle High two years ago and members of the DART 2-D2 team are the first to take Engineering III. Some 40 students are currently reenrolled in Engineering I.

“These courses are ideally suited to the student who is interested in pursuing a career in the engineering field,” said HHS Principal Jeff Hyche. “As the courses gain exposure to the student body, we expect enrollment to increase.”

Two career engineers sat in on the dry run presentation and both were impressed with what they saw. “Today, students in the seventh grade are exposed to information we didn’t have until we were in college,” one of them remarked.