NASA recruited Pitt to track the Artemis II mission

As NASA's Artemis II mission got underway this week, students and faculty from the Swanson School of Engineering, with support from Pitt Space, brought their ham radios to the roof of Benedum hall to tune in to the Orion spacecraft.

Pitt was one of just eight universities chosen by NASA to determine whether academic or commercial groups, or individuals, had the capabilities to track the spacecraft as it went on its record-breaking 248,655-mile flight around the moon and back.

"It's really an honor that we get to work on the project," said Sawyer Mervis. He and Jake Wendt are both senior electrical engineering students and members of the Panther Amateur Radio Club (PARC).

The club designed and built the equipment for the project with support from faculty, including Juan Mandfredi, professor of math in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, along with Samuel Dickerson, associate professor, vice chair for education and the director of the computer engineering undergraduate program and Mark Kahrs, an instructor, both in the Swanson School's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Their radios were a necessary component of the project, but to bring the technology into the 21st century, the team took advantage of Pitt Digital's partnership with Anthropic.

"Finding that signal is like finding a needle in a haystack," Dickerson said. "We were able to use Claude so that we knew when we needed to point the antenna to hopefully catch the astronauts' signal."