University and community college students will get a boost in their studies and support in launching their careers during Rocket Week June 15-22, 2018, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Nearly 200 university and community college students and instructors from across the country will build and fly experiments on a NASA suborbital rocket through the RockOn! and RockSat-C programs.
Another 20 high school educators from across the United States will be at the Facility to examine how to apply rocketry basics into their curriculum through the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers (WRATs)
The week culminates at 5:30 a.m. EDT, June 21, with the launch of a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket carrying the students’ experiments. The rocket is 36 feet long and the payload weighs 667 pounds.
The NASA Visitor Center at Wallops will open at 4:30 a.m. EDT on launch day for viewing the flight. Live coverage of the mission is scheduled to begin at 5 a.m. on the Wallops Ustream site. Launch updates also are available via the Wallops Facebook and Twitter sites. Facebook Live coverage begins at 5:15 a.m. The rocket launch is expected to be seen from the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland.
The rocket will carry 28 experiments (measuring acceleration, humidity, pressure, temperature and radiation counts) from the RockOn! Program and several experiments from nine schools in the RockSat-C program and more than 80 small cubes with experiments developed by middle school and high school students as part of the Cubes in Space program, a partnership between idoodlelearning inc. and the Colorado Space Grant Consortium.
The rocket will fly the student experiments to nearly 73-miles altitude. The experiments will land via parachute in the Atlantic Ocean where they will be recovered by boat. The participants should have their experiments returned to them later in the day to begin their data analysis.
Joyce Winterton, Wallops senior advisor for education and leadership development, said, “Rocket Week provides the participants with the opportunity to receive an authentic, hands-on learning experience. For the RockOn! and RockSat-C students, they are able to apply what they’ve learned in their courses and gain an invaluable experience for their careers. For the WRATS educators, they learn from engineers here at Wallops practical applications that can be applied in the classroom as they inspire the next generation.”
Conducted with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia, RockOn! is in its eleventh year, RockSat-C its tenth year and WRATS is in its eighth year.
“NASA has been supporting all three programs for many years, showing the value of this type of learning experience,” said Giovanni Rosanova, chief of the NASA Sounding Rocket Program Office at Wallops. “Sounding rockets and all of NASA’s suborbital programs provide a unique opportunity for hands-on and experiential learning for students.”
Participants in RockOn! receive instruction on the basics required to develop a scientific payload for flight on a suborbital rocket. After learning the basics in RockOn!, students may then participate in RockSat-C, where during the school year they design and build an experiment for rocket flight.
Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, said, “This year we have the largest class for RockOn! in its 11 years with nearly 100 participants. Working with NASA personnel, building an experiment and watching it fly into space is something the participants find exciting and some of the reasons this program continues to grow.”
WRATS works with high school teachers to show them the basics of rocketry and how to take what they learn into the classroom. The 20 participants from Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Michigan, North Carolina, Illinois, Georgia and Pennsylvania will receive instruction on the basics of rocketry including Newton’s Laws, fundamentals of electronics, drag and propulsion. This instruction will be applied to hands-on learning activities including building and launching model rockets. The educators also will attend the June 21 rocket launch.
The RockOn!, RockSat and WRATS programs are supported by the NASA Sounding Rocket Program. RockOn! also is supported by NASA’s Office of Education and NASA’s National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia, as well as the program participants.
NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program is conducted at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility, which is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA’s Heliophysics Division manages the sounding rocket program for the agency.
Header Image: Participants in RockOn!, RockSat-C and WRATS gather for a group photo following the 2017 rocket launch. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland
Keith Koehler
Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.
757-825-1579
keith.a.koehler@nasa.gov
RockSat-C participants and projects
Arizona Space Grant Consortium
The Arizona Space Grant Consortium team is a collaboration between the University of Arizona in Tucson and Arizona State University in Tempe. The mission has four objectives: to generate a continuous panoramic image as the rocket ascends cylindrical image of flight and eventually create a virtually explorable visualization of flight; to measure ionizing radiation; to observe radiation effects on bacteria and immune cells; and to measure atmospheric data using a low-cost LiDAR system.
Cubes in Space
Cubes in Space is an educational program for students age 11-18 to design experiments in a 40 mm cube and launch on a sounding rocket. The program builds awareness in the pre-college age group about easily accessible, short-duration, and relatively low-cost spaceflight missions and opportunities in support of scientific exploration objectives.
Hobart and William Smith College
The Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York, team is studying muon flux at different levels in the atmosphere as well as modeling how Earth’s magnetic field changes with respect to altitude using a magnetometer. The team also is developing a curriculum for local middle school students based on their magnetometer experiment to promote STEM outreach. From this experiment, this team believes their results may be able to provide assistance to scientists to better model the upper atmosphere and how to interact with it.
Langston University
The goal of the Langston University in Oklahoma STEM team is to design and manufacture a clinostat – a device meant to combat the rotation of a rocket, which can be used to support growth of biological samples. The clinostat will contain vials with prebiotic and probiotic samples that will be stabilized by the clinostat. The team is also conducting a ground experiment with a centrifuge to see how the samples are affected in both situations and compare the effectiveness of the clinostat. With their results, the team hopes to study dysregulation in the immune system of astronauts during prolonged flights.
Oregon Institute of Technology
Oregon Tech’s mission consists of four main experiments: a radiation shield test using four Geiger tubes, a fiber optic gyroscope mission, a data management system to record experimental values, and the development of a universal mounting system for future RockSat-C missions. Through their experiment, Oregon Tech in Klamath Falls hopes to design better systems for space applications and encourage the program at their institution.
Stevens Institute of Technology
Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, will conduct two experiments during flight. The first objective is to create a system that can record and isolate vibrations occurring in the payload for sensitive electronics and other equipment. The second experiment will measure the High-Speed Boundary Layer Transitions from laminar to turbulent pressure waves using a high frequency pressure sensor mounted in the multipurpose port. After gathering data, the team hopes to characterize the transition phase of the boundary layer through various pressures and velocities along the surface of the rocket.
University of Delaware
The University of Delaware in Newark will demonstrate the durability and test performance characteristics of a graphene-silicon based optical chip under launch conditions and construct a reusable inertial navigation system and platform for future RockSat-C missions at their university. The team is launching their experiment as part of their senior capstone project, and hope to provide accurate data for the newly developed optical chip to aid with research at their university.
University of Wisconsin
The University of Wisconsin team is a collaboration between students at the Milwaukee and Sheboygan campuses. Their mission is to observe the effects of rocket flight to the lower atmosphere on DNA plasmid transfer rates and use sensors to measure the conditions during flight. The team will use four Geiger counters (with and without shielding) to study how radiation affects the samples. The team believes the data will help to better understand how the conditions found in space might affect the efficiency with which bacteria communicate with each other (such as how antibiotic resistance could be spread at a higher rate during extended space travel).
Washington & Jefferson College
The Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, team will measure the intensity of electron and ion currents in space to calculate the density and temperature of plasma. In addition, the team will measure the sodium density in a narrow layer of the atmosphere and include a Geiger tube as a radiation experiment. The team hopes their results will assist others to better understand the nature of the ionosphere.
West Virginia Collaboration
The West Virginia Space Flight Design Challenge is a collaboration between NASA IV&V in Fairmont, West Virginia; Fairmont State University; Blue Ridge Community and Technical College in Martinsburg; West Virginia University’s (WVU) in Morgantown Amateur Radio Club and the National Society of Black Engineers. Fairmont’s mission is to record the trajectory of the rocket and record its data in real time to eventually model the flight in 3D. Blue Ridge hopes to capture vibration data that can be used to help future teams create experiments that are designed to withstand harsh vibrations with the use of Piezoelectric Ceramic Disks. The goal of the WVU Amateur Radio Club’s experiment is to provide a method of telemetry collection through the use of a transmitting station aboard the rocket and a receiving station at the launch site. They will use two antennae (one transmitting and the other a GPS) in their multipurpose port. The WVU National Society of Black Engineers will collect and store flight data (altitude, temperature, pressure, trajectory, rotation, and speed). Finally, the NASA IV&V Pathways Agency Cross-Center Connections interns’ experiment includes a microfluidics experiment designed to observe channel occlusion due to protein aggregation, an RNA folding experiment, and a synthetic protocell gene expression experiment. They believe their data will benefit NASA’s goal of sustained space flight, medical/pharmaceutical research and development, and the field of astrobiology research.