CSU Students Launch Experiments to Space on NASA Sounding Rocket
This summer, four Colorado State University students experienced first-hand the excitement of a NASA launch as they watched a NASA suborbital sounding rocket take off from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The CSU team joined students from 21 states for a weeklong RockOn/RockSat workshop. The workshop is conducted in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia with support from NASA. Dr. Azer Yalin, associate professor of mechanical engineering, directs Colorado State University’s NASA Space Grant program, which sponsored the students’ trip to Virginia.
After preparing their experiments, the undergraduates and their instructors got to see their experiments rise to the sky at 5:30 a.m. on the morning of June 26. The two-stage Terrier-Orion rocket carried the experiments to an altitude of 73 miles. The experiments were recovered and the students successfully retrieved data from their experiments, including accelerations, pressure, temperature, radiation, and upper atmosphere gas samples.
Tim Schneider, a CSU sophomore, represented a mechanical engineering team that built one of the projects flown on the rocket. The students are now back on campus working on future experiments for flight on subsequent launches. Matt Lyon and Kenny Vogel, seniors in mechanical engineering/engineering science, and Grant Rhoads, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, will use the knowledge they gained at the RockOn/RockSat workshop to prepare for a new Sr. Design Project this fall.
“We are very thankful for the opportunity and experience this program provided us,” said Lyon, “and look forward to coming back next year for another amazing week and launch!”