The RockOn! and RockSat-C student payload was successfully launched on a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket at 5:30 a.m. EDT, Thursday, June 21, 2018, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The payload flew to an altitude of 75 miles during its suborbital flight. After landing in the Atlantic Ocean via a parachute, the payload was recovered and will be returned later today to Wallops for the students to access their experiments and begin their data analysis.
More than 200 students and 20 educators from around the United States were present for the launch.
“Having all these teams come together as one at the end, and meeting requirements that NASA professionals meet is enormously exciting,” said RockSat-C participant Emily Certain, a junior studying mechanical and aerospace engineering at West Virginia University, Morgantown.
“Just being able to come to Wallops to experience things first hand and then go back to our institution is a very unique and useful experience,” said Rockon! participant Brady Kinner, a junior studying mechanical engineering and computer science at Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. “The most exciting part was working on these parts and finally seeing it take off to the sky.”
The 36-foot tall rocket carried a 667-pound payload made up of 28 student experiments from the RockOn! program, several experiments from the RockSat-C program, and 80 small cubes developed by students from the Cubes in Space program, a partnership between idoodlelearning inc. and the Colorado Space Grant Consortium.
“Our rocket team consists of so many backgrounds of people and a lot of us haven’t had the opportunity to have been through a program like this one,” said RockOn! participant Thayne Yazzie, a faculty member at Northwest Indian College, Bellingham, Washington. “To see our students excel, not just in their school, but in their lives is really cool.”
Conducted with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia, RockOn! is in its eleventh year, and RockSat-C its tenth year.
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 Caption: The 2018 RockOn! students working on their experiments on June 18.
Credits: NASA/Patrick Black
Haley Weisgerber
NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility