(bright music) - [Announcer] Tonight on "Rhode Island PBS Weekly".

- [Isabella] A group of local university students with little money and little time created a mini satellite that launched aboard a SpaceX rocket last year.

- Ignition and lift off.

- Tonight, we find out how they pulled it off and about the big problem they're trying to solve.

- There's a great deal of light pollution in Rhode Island because we're situated in the northeast and the northeast is really densely populated.

- Of all the pollution issues, this is the one that the everyday person can make a huge difference in with such a minimal effort.

- You know, you can hardly think of French cooking without mushrooms, the French call them champignon.

- They have a stem, they have a cap, some have veils, but all are pretty great.

(bright music) - Good evening, welcome to "Rhode Island PBS Weekly", I'm Michelle San Miguel.

- And I'm Pamela Watts.

More than 65 years ago, the former Soviet Union made one of the most significant technological breakthroughs ever by launching its Sputnik Satellite into space.

- Since then, thousands of satellites have orbited the earth, bringing us everything from live television, advanced weather forecasting, internet communications, and GPS.

Despite those advances, the sheer number of those objects is creating a major problem.

Tonight producer, Isabella Jibilian, introduces us to some students in our own backyard defying the odds to help solve that issue.

- And lift off.

- Last year, this SpaceX rocket ship blasted into space, carrying some cargo from Rhode Island, a little satellite that could called SBUDNIC.

- So this is SBUDNIC.

This is kind of like a prototype model but this is the exact size and shape of SBUDNIC's chassis.

- [Isabella] Marco Cross was a graduate student at Brown University, and lead engineer on the SBUDNIC satellite team.

- I feel like the entire development period was just kind of like a controlled panic attack, like it was just like, you know, like every day was just another rollercoaster.

- Is there anything new going on in space transportation?

- [Isabella] His professor was Rick Fleeter.

- You can't launch it from the ground 'cause you've got air and everything around, you've gotta get it into space.

- [Isabella] A space engineer known for his pioneering work with small satellites.

- A friend of mine had a launch available because another satellite had canceled, but it was launching in less than a year and nobody builds a satellite in less than a year, they normally take like 15 years.

Without knowing anything, of course, I said, sure, no problem.

(laughs) And then I took it to my students.

- To be clear, something that never happens ever in space, like never.

- So it's your golden ticket.

- Yeah, pretty much.

He offered it to us and, of course, we took it.

- [Isabella] A team of 40 students went to work on the project.

The clock was ticking and the budget was tight, forcing them to experiment with new materials.

- 3D printing in space is not new, but we used materials for the 3D printer that are something that you can buy on Amazon for 20 bucks.

Printed parts in space are typically done with specialist materials and machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

- [Isabella] Their thrifty solutions would be tested in the most extreme of conditions.

- There's radiation concerns, there's physical degradation concerns, materials in space, because there's virtually no pressure from the atmosphere, materials that we think of as solid almost boil off, just disappear.

- [Isabella] Plus, these days, satellites face another threat, space junk, dangerous debris, which circles earth at thousands of miles per hour.

- If you were to put a frozen pea into orbit and there was a satellite traveling, like something the size of a car, and the pea traveling in the other direction, that pea hitting that satellite, it would be a catastrophic event for the satellite.

- Because the pea is moving- - So fast.

- [Isabella] Decades ago, there was little worry about space junk because fewer satellites were in orbit, that's not the case today.

- Imagine you had a hundred cars on the whole face of the entire earth or a hundred airplanes, would you really be worried about them running into each other?

People are like, give me a break, this is not ever gonna happen, it's so unlikely.

And then it started to happen.

There was a a time when the windshield of the space shuttle was damaged from what turned out to be a chip of paint, and then NASA started having to move the Space Station around to avoid collisions.

So it's gone from kind of a science fiction like, you know, not credible at all to a, yeah, this is part of our reality nowadays.

- [Isabella] The ultimate concern is that space junk can multiply.

- Because if you have a single collision, it's gonna break both things into a million pieces.

So instead of having two objects in orbit, you have 2,000 objects in orbit.

- [Astronaut] Debris from the missile strike has caused a chain reaction.

- [Isabella] It's a problem featured in the movie, "Gravity".

- Explorer's been hit.

- Ah!

- Explorer, do you read?

- Ah!

- [Isabella] Excessive amounts of debris could render entire orbits too dangerous to enter.

As more satellites are launched, it becomes an even greater threat.

- If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi planet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing.

- [Isabella] In 2019, Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, began launching a network of Starling satellites to provide internet access across the globe.

- [Marco] SpaceX itself has deployed between three and 4,000 satellites alone in the last four years, five years.

They have plans to deploy another basically 30,000 satellites up in similar orbits.

- [Isabella] Adding to the congestion, old decommissioned satellites can stay in orbit for decades before falling to earth and burning up in the atmosphere.

- In principle, you would have 10 times less space junk if everybody came down in three years instead of 30 years.

- [Isabella] That's exactly what SBUDNIC was designed to do, to bring down satellites faster with a low-cost mechanism called a drag sail.

- It looks like this.

That's kind of the packed version, keeping this restrained, these wings restrained and then they popped free like that, both pop free like so.

This doesn't require power, this just works.

So the drag sail itself is designed to deploy from the back of SBUDNIC, like a fan, it catches atmosphere and basically slows SBUDNIC down.

So we've dramatically increased the speed with which SBUDNIC will fall out of orbit.

- [Isabella] The team spent a grueling 18 months in the workshop, launch day was fast approaching.

- And we had to do exceptionally aggressive testing during that time, in a couple instances, they nearly failed.

Those were heart stopping events.

- [Isabella] In May of 2022, members of the team gathered on a Cape Canaveral beach to watch the launch.

- We saw the rocket go up.

- Whoo!

- [Marco] I was proud, I was really proud of my team.

- We do have to look up.

- Yay, whoo!

- [Isabella] But then, radio silence.

- We didn't hear from SBUDNIC ever.

That was devastating because part of our mission was to hear or to test radio communication from space.

We just kind of were like, ah, SBUDNIC is lost.

- [Isabella] The silence went on for nearly a year, but in early March of 2023.

- [Marco] So like, let's say, I wanna see where SBUDNIC's at right now.

- [Isabella] They checked a government website that tracks satellites and there it was.

- This is mission success right here.

This is drag sail's success.

- [Isabella] SBUDNIC was lower in orbit than other satellites on the launch.

- The only reasonable explanation was that SBUDNIC had successfully deployed its drag sails.

- [Isabella] The data shows that rather than staying in orbit for 25 years, SBUDNIC will stay up for about five.

- Hopefully, we will see more satellites using similar technology to pull their mass out of orbit.

- To prevent themselves from becoming space junk.

- To prevent themselves from becoming space junk.

- [Isabella] Today, Marco Cross is a marine engineer in Rhode Island, but he still returns to Brown's workshop to mentor a new crop of space designers.

One group explores new spacesuit designs, another, how magnetic fields could one day defend against radiation.

- At some point in the future, years from now, SBUDNIC will burn up in the atmosphere and that will be the true end of the satellite mission.

- But the spirit of SBUDNIC lives on.

Scientists from countries like Australia and the Dominican Republic saw how SBUDNIC was developed for $15,000 rather than 15 million, and saw an opportunity to start space programs of their own.

So, who dominates most of the space world?

- It's mostly dominated by countries who can afford it, that would be the US, Russia, China, it's a small club, Canada, the European Space Agency.

- And so, you're seeing an opportunity for the club to get bigger.

- Yeah.

- Conceptually, this makes sense for satellites of this size.

- [Isabella] As for Marco Cross, the experience was something he had been dreaming about since childhood.

- You hear about Cape Canaveral as a kid, or at least I did as a space nerd as a kid, is this is like the place, this is where it happened.

To be part of that lineage, to be part of that legacy, even in a small part, for me, that's a memory that I, yeah, I mean, that I'll treasure forever.

(bright music) - We turn now to a form of pollution that's rarely talked about, but over the years, has taken away our connection to the sky above.

In another installment of our Green Seeker series, photojournalist and editor, Ross Lippman, visited one Rhode Island town last October where darkness is creating a window to the universe.

- When I think of light pollution, I often think of Van Gogh, you know, his Starry Night is one of the most searched and sought after pieces of artwork.

It's incredible.

(gentle music) And I think, what would that painting look like if he had looked out and saw light pollution in France when it was, you know, inspiring him?

And all of those beautiful swirls that you see in the night sky that he created, they would've been just blobs of yellow fog.

If you wanna be inspired, like Van Gogh was inspired, where do you go in Rhode Island?

For me, I go to Charlestown.

(bright music) (waves crashing) The only place in Rhode Island that I've ever seen the Milky Way is in Charlestown.

My children went many years having never seen the Milky Way, and when they first saw it in Charlestown, when we were down at Frosty Drew, they were absolutely amazed.

- [Scott] Charlestown is this little like gem in Rhode Island.

- Hi, how are you guys tonight?

How many for?

- Once you leave the beach, the quest isn't over because now, when the sun sets, you have thousands of stars overhead that you're not gonna see pretty much anywhere else you're going.

(people chattering) (light music) - [Kimberly] Frosty Drew to me is it's like the little observatory that could Fort Island.

(light music) It gives you these fantastic views.

- [Scott] And the Milky Way is starting to become even more visible to us right now.

- It's a pretty powerful experience.

(light music continues) I think of light pollution as just too much light where it shouldn't be.

It's this idea that there is an extraordinary amount of light that is unnecessary that is directed into the wrong place, that's crowding up the sky where we cannot see the night sky any longer, we cannot see the stars that we've been able to see for generations.

There's a great deal of light pollution in Rhode Island because we're situated in the northeast, and the northeast is really densely populated.

So when you've got that dense population, what happens typically is that you've got a lot of buildings, a lot of structures, and those buildings and structures are lit up pretty heavily.

- If you went to a spot like Frosty Drew, then you can get outside of a lot of it and actually see a lot more stars.

But the majority of people living in Rhode Island, they don't see the Milky Way, they don't look up at that sky and see an inspirational view, they see light pollution.

(lively music) - I do think there's excess lights when you're walking around Providence at night, I would say there are areas to be able to fix that I think wouldn't cause a lot of problems to change.

Even things like the way say the State House is lit up at night, that could be done I think a little bit more subtly.

Making sure all of the street lights, the neighborhood lights, the city lights in general are well shielded, which means the light is being directed down.

Because when you have an unshielded light, there's a whole lot of excess light that just goes bounces right up to the sky.

It's not about removing lights, not completely, it's about lighting better, it's about lighting smarter.

And I feel like that's one thing I actually really appreciate about the topic of light pollution, I feel like it is imminently fixable.

- Of all the pollution issues that are out there, this is the one that the everyday person can really make a huge difference in with such a minimal effort.

When you come in at night, turn off your lights, just hit that switch.

(gentle music) - Charlestown's the darkest spot along the Atlantic coast between New York and Boston.

If you're flying into Rhode Island, you see the lights all around the region and then there's a dark spot along the coast, which is Charlestown.

In Charlestown, we passed a dark sky ordinance in 2012.

I think that people who've lived here for a while and experienced the dark sky are very much in favor of protecting it.

Frosty Drew Observatory is really important to protecting our dark skies because it's so easy to quantify what's being lost, and when we lose the dark sky, we will eventually lose the observatory, they won't be able to do their work because it'll be like every other place that has lost its sky.

- We'll have two telescopes set up in the courtyard too that you can go up to whenever you would like.

- Sweet, awesome, thank you.

- All right, you're welcome.

- I think people need to understand that view that exists down there.

We also have the Perseids still happening, which will radiate from the constellation, Perseus.

It requires everyone to work together to do that.

(gentle music) It's not just because it's Charlestown that it's dark, it's because everyone in Charlestown is working to keep it dark.

So the Big Dipper is these three stars make the handle and then the fourth one here makes the root of the bowl.

- Observatories, like Frosty Drew, can really provide that firsthand experience for Rhode Islanders of what absolute gems our universe has for us and how important it is to keep that link to the night sky.

Humans have been looking up at the night sky forever and we really don't know what it is we're losing when we cut off such an important part of our existence.

So having that direct access to the night sky from the ground, from here on earth, is a really important thing.

(gentle music continues) - Up next, as part of our continuing My Take series, we take you to Coventry, Rhode Island to meet a man who's passionate about fungus.

Well, at least a certain kind.

- Mushrooms are for everybody that enjoys to consume them.

My name is Sam Morgan, I am the owner and operator of High Tide Mushroom Farm and this is my take on mushrooms.

Mushrooms are the plant-like structure of fungi.

They have a stem, they have a cap, some have veils, but all are pretty great.

(upbeat music) We have a plethora of different mushrooms that we grow, dependent on the season.

If it's cold weather, we focus more on cold tolerant species of mushrooms, whether it's golden enoki, king oysters, blue oysters, chestnut mushrooms.

And then, when the weather starts warming up, we kind of try to switch our rooms over to warmer weather tolerant mushrooms, whether it's pink oyster mushrooms, yellow oyster mushrooms, pioppino mushrooms, phoenix oyster or the Italian oyster mushroom, king blue oysters, and so on.

I got into mushrooms for a few reasons.

I was a firefighter and paramedic 10 years prior to getting into the agricultural realm of mushroom cultivation.

Mushrooms are like the coral of the land, they're great remediators and filtration devices, for not only our land, but they're great filter devices for our water as well.

- Welcome to "The French Chef".

I'm Julia Child, we're doing mushrooms today.

All kinds of ways to use them.

You know, you can hardly think of French cooking without mushrooms, the French call them champignon.

- So when people hear the term "gourmet mushrooms", they usually think of blue oyster or anything within the oyster family of mushroom, which are great mushrooms, they are protein dense, full of umami flavor, they add a nice texture to whatever you're cooking, they can take center stage of a meal or they can be an accessory to a meal to add some flavor.

There are other gourmet mushrooms.

We have lion's mane, we have pioppino mushrooms, we have golden enoki mushrooms, and all these mushrooms have different kind of flavors, different kind of textures, and they add something special to every meal.

There's two, I would say, two different schools of thought when people first look at lion's mane, like, oh, what's that?

Or, ooh, what's that?

(lion roaring) It's a pretty cool mushroom, it's neuro adaptive, so anything to do with the brain, it helps stimulate NGF growth in the brain, so anything with, you know, motor function, sensory perception, ADD, ADHD, OCD, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and dementia, lion's mane's being studied for because of the compounds within it.

(buzzer blaring) Not all mushrooms are edible.

If you're gonna go out foraging, go through the woods and start looking for mushrooms 'cause you're excited to get into the realm of mushrooms and mycology, I would say, you know, start with getting to know your environment, start to get to know your trees, what locations you're looking to start searching and what kind of mushrooms you're looking for.

It's not necessarily too hard if you start to zone in and focus on one or two mushrooms you wanna find in your area, and you can do so in a couple different ways.

I would say pick up an encyclopedia that, you know, deals with mushrooms, or also, there's apps nowadays that you could take a photo of a mushroom and it'll give a statistical probability of what that mushroom is.

So if you're doing a little bit of cross-referencing and you're getting out into the woods and you're seeing some mushrooms you like, or you, you know, wanna take home, maybe take some spore prints, I would say you need to be a hundred percent confident on your choice before putting it in your mouth.

Mushrooms are a hot topic right now, and, to me, that's no surprise, mushrooms are not only delicious, but the mycelium of mushrooms, which is the root-like structure of mushrooms that connects the mushroom to the ground or its fruiting substrate has several applications.

Packing peanuts are gonna be replaced with mycelium, alternative leather for shoes and clothing is gonna be mycelium-based, NASA is also studying to use mycelium as their structural basis to any kind of housing structure, whether it be on Mars or our interplanetary travels.

Mushrooms or the spores of mushrooms can live in the vacuum of time and space.

My name is Sam Morgan, and this has been my take on mushrooms.

(bright music) - Finally tonight, a sneak peek to a story we'll bring you next week about Central Falls science teacher, David Upegui.

He's empowering students to help solve some of the world's biggest problems.

(bowl ringing) - Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.

- Good afternoon.

- Good afternoon.

- [Michelle] Years after David Upegui graduated from Central Falls High School, he returned to his alma mater to teach science.

- But before we do, let me ask a question, we're gonna start with Elizabeth.

- They have a very unusual eye color, could that be related?

- Yeah, you guys remember when we talked about people that have jaundice?

Could this be related to jaundice?

- [Michelle] His medical interventions class is a favorite amongst students.

- Oh, is this something that's progressively getting worse?

Is this some kind of progressive disease?

Good question.

- [Michelle] He begins each class by showing them a picture of a medical phenomenon and has students ask questions about it to try to figure out what caused it.

- Is this related to what's around it?

Good.

Let me go right across here.

- Is this person in a coma?

- Can this person see?

- Are they dead?

- Are they dead?

- [Michelle] After 10 minutes of nonstop questions, he reveals to students what they're looking at.

- But here's what happened, this was a punch to the head that caused this man in Austria to actually have a star.

- [Michelle] He says it's an exercise in getting students comfortable with asking medical questions.

- She knew it was damage to the subdural and then she knew it was a cataract.

When students ask questions, it is a way to recognize that they're engaged, but that they're also thinking deeper.

- [Michelle] Upegui wants his students to be problem solvers, that mindset informs how he teaches.

- Just you all know, you have eight weeks left of school.

- Yay.

- Oh my God!

- They're going to inherit an earth, a planet that is hotter than it's ever, you know, than it's been since humans have been around.

It's an overpopulated planet, a planet with political turmoil, with wars, with famine, with huge ecological issues that need to be addressed.

I see what I do as empowering these children to solve those issues because whether we like it or not, that's the planet they're getting.

- And that's our broadcast this evening.

Thank you for joining us, I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

We'll be back next week with another edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly".

Until then, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at ripbs.org/weekly or listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform.

Thank you and goodnight.

(bright music) (bright music continues)