University of Colorado students crash land a NASA satellite

Talk about a dream project: a group of Colorado University students were hand-picked by NASA to help them on a space mission. What was that mission? To crash the hurtling, flaming debris of an out-of-control space aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean.

The satellite was one of NASA's own and known as ICESat, or Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite. For the past seven years, it had been blooping happily above the skin of the Earth, gathering data on ice sheets that could be fed into climate change models. But then, as often happens, it just stopped working and became another bit of space junk, twinkling in the sky above.

Failing to restart the satellite, NASA scientists decided to outsource the task of crashing it into the ocean to some plucky Colorado University students, who competed on their off hours over the course of many long nights and holidays to earn the job.

According to ICESat flight director Darrin Osborne, the Colorado University students had a lot on their plate in order to successfully bring the one ton satellite down to Earth (preferably in the Atlantic Ocean, and not Atlantic City).

"They ran calculations to determine where the spacecraft was located and made predictions for NASA ground stations that tracked it," he said. "The students did this seven days a week until the decommission was complete."

That's a heck of a thing to start off having put on your post-college resume. If these kids want jobs when they're out of school, at the very least, my guess is NASA will be interested.