We have liftoff.

Well, not yet, but soon.

Engineering students at the University of Kentucky are once again working with NASA on a mission.

The Kentucky Reentry Probe Experiment three, or Crep three mission, will gather data on heat shield performance to help ensure a safe and successful trip to space.

54321.

There's a lot of NASA missions, right?

They send a rocket to space.

They need to send the astronauts or the samples home.

So they need a heat shield in order to do that.

So that way it doesn't burn up in atmospheric reentry.

So now you can you can then put a whole bunch of material on and that's that's great.

And you'll definitely get home safe.

But that adds weight and it adds size.

So you want it to be as small as possible, but you don't want it to fail because you have astronauts and samples in your rocket coming back.

The big reason that we're doing is sending it to space versus just testing it here on the ground is that it's really, really difficult to get all of the conditions exactly how it will be in space.

We have reentry vehicles that ride up to the International Space Station on the Cygnus resupply vehicle.

Astronauts pull a pin in them, which starts the flight computer, which is what I designed, and they put them back into the capsule.

Or.

Excuse me, the reentry vehicle.

It reenters the atmosphere.

That reentry vehicle breaks up, and these capsules, come out of their shells and start collecting reentry data.

So we have been, over the years, over 15 years now in working, on the heat shield at the university.

So we've developed this unique expertise in the US as a university, to be able to model heat shield, to understand how they work, to numerically replicate in a computer, how they behave.

And one of the things that we've decided to do is to add to that expertise, some flight capability.

So that started maybe 10 or 12 years ago, where some of the undergraduate at the university came and said, well, we want to have a project where we're instead of just modeling them in a computer.

We want to actually do it like build a capsule and use a real heat shield.

It's very important, and it's one of the most unreliable things that we still have difficulties with.

If no heat shield and you lose the entire payload, and that could include humans.

We're also testing the stability of these new shape.

We have a heat shield that's already deployed deployable.

So this is a concept that NASA has to, be able to have a larger heat shield.

So think about the umbrella.

For instance.

You can store an umbrella and a pretty close cylinder.

But when you need it, it just spreads open.

Having the opportunity to, to glue the one of these capsules together, it came in a bunch of different panels having the opportunity to glue that together.

You just can't find that anywhere.

It's a it's a really unique experience.

And then, I mean, to be able to send hardware to the space station, right?

That's that's really neat.

So for the most part, it's really academic.

You know, they're designing algorithms or they're creating models and, trying to predict what's really going to happen.

But we're building true hardware and experiments to see what happens.

And so, I think having that hands on physical experience was really unique and pretty amazing, right?

NASA has scheduled the Crep three mission in early April.