A number of timely confluences came together to make STELLA in its current form possible—and interns are part of the story.

In 2017, Paul Mirel was working with a NASA heliophysics group called HEAT (Heliophysics Education Activation Team). He came up with an idea to create an educational instrument that could measure visible portions of the spectrum so that students could recreate some early experiments that helped us better understand the light spectrum. Mirel developed an instrument with funding from NASA’s STEAM Innovation Lab.The Landsat Outreach Team was at the time working with an intern to develop a user- and education-friendly spectrometer.

A decade earlier, in 2008, a former Landsat Outreach Specialist, Jeannie Allen, found a hands-on, classroom-friendly spectrometer developed by the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and incorporated it into formal and informal Landsat education projects, allowing users to graph and understand spectral signatures.Ginger Butcher, the current Landsat Outreach lead, a hands-on learning and makerspace advocate, embraced the use of the tool, but wanted something with a data viewer and expanded spectral capabilities. She brought on intern Lauren Antt to help create a new tool. Antt connected with Jimmy Acevedo, an intern that had previously worked with Mirel in Observational Cosmology. Together with Butcher, they reached out to Mirel to discuss extending his visible spectrum instrument with near infrared sensors.

Meanwhile, Mirel’s grade school friend and UVA professor, Lerdau, was looking for an educational tool that could measure photosynthetic activity and evapotranspiration to help students understand how sensors could be used to measure and monitor those processes. He asked Mirel if he could help develop such a tool. With Landsat-funding, Mirel, was able combine the requests of Butcher and Lerdau and develop a low-cost instrument that demonstrates how Landsat satellites work and incorporates visible, near infrared, and thermal measurements.STELLA was born.

Note: The modular design of STELLA provides the perfect platform to expand capabilities for other science investigations such as incorporating new sensors to measure air quality or adding cuvettes to capture spectral data from liquids.