Team RockOn! With NASA
Published: 2012-12-03Category: General Announcements
Eastern Shore Community College students had an opportunity to join students and educators from across the country to experience being a rocket scientist at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility during Rocket Week held June 16-22.
Team ESCC was comprised of John Floyd, Assistant Professor Electroincs, Nygel Meese, electronics student, and 2012 ESCC graduate, Thomas Palmer.
The group spent a week at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility building, testing and preparing their experiment to fly on a 35’ Terrier-Orion suborbital sounding rocket. Working in teams of three or four, each RockOn! team received an experiment kit consisting of an AVR processor, various sensors, mounting hardware and programming software. Chris Koehler, Director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, was the workshop instructor. By midweek all experiments were installed in the payload structure and transported to Wallops Island for mating with the rocket motors.
At approximately 6:40 a.m. on June 22, the Terrier booster ignited and the teams cheered as the rocket went almost 75 miles into space. A parachute ensured that the sealed payload survived the return impact with the ocean. The payload floated in the water until it was picked up by the recovery boat and was returned to the Wallops Flight Facility where the post-flight data analysis was conducted.
Others RockOn! participating institutions included: Capitol College, Carthage College, East Carolina University, Fisk University, Inter American University of Puerto Rico, Johns Hopkins University, Loyola Marymount University, Montana State University, Mt. San Antonio College, Triangle Coalition/NASA Aeronautic Research Mission, and the University of Iowa.
RockON! Is conducted in coordination with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant consortia. Supported by the National Space College and Fellowship Program in NASA’s Office of Education, it is designed to provide participants an introduction to building small experiments that can be launched on sounding rockets. Funding for local college participants was provided by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) MentorLinks grant and the ESCC Foundation.
