Catie Cleveland
NASA Payload in Lab
Credit: Catie Cleveland – College of Charleston
In a rare opportunity, undergraduate students helped develop payloads for space orbit and are now heading to Kennedy Space Center for the launch.
Two astrophysics students who graduate next month from the College of Charleston are seeing years of hard work come to fruition, with a planned launch of research instruments they helped develop.
The payload heading to the International Space Station includes a liquid lens-based optical camera that will monitor biological specim
The equipment will be transported from a College of Charleston lab to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center this week, set to blast off on April 8.
The complex instruments were developed under the supervision of Joe Carson, professor of astrophysics at the College and Marcos Díaz, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Universidad de Chile, who also supervised a Chilean student.
This is the College’s first time contributing to a space-based mission. The team’s work was featured in the Winter 2025 edition of the College of Charleston Magazine.
The cameras will collect data in space for about six months. The information will be analyzed once the payload returns in the fall.
“It's really cool to be able to tell people that we have this really exciting mission going into space, into the International Space Station, and then later deployed into a lower orbit, and it's also really cool to say that I have touched something it will be in space,” says College of Charleston student Eva Godwin.
Fellow CofC student Gael Gonzalez says it’s thrilling to have this level of access to the mission. “I’ve been to Florida many times, but never to the Kennedy Space Center, and now I have the opportunity to actually enter the building and do final integrations before the launch,” he says.
The project is special not only because of its highly collaborative nature with a university in Chile, but also because of student involvement at the undergraduate level.
“I think it’s definitely rare to have undergraduate students playing such a central role,” says Carson, noting the students were involved in every aspect of the project, from feasibility to fundraising, to doing modeling and testing, and then
“We have smart people from around the world working on this project,” says Carson, noting it’s been rewarding to see the students learn and grow. All three students involved in the project plan to enter Ph.D. programs and will do so with impressive resumes.