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Nearly 200 college students from across the country will be at the Wallops Flight Facility next week building experiments and launching them on a suborbital rocket.
Rocket Week actually begins Saturday and continues through next week for the students, a NASA news release says. About 20 educators will learn how to use rocketry basics in their curriculum.
A rocket will carry experiments from next week’s program along with others developed by middle school students as part of a separate program.
The rocket will reach nearly 70 miles altitude and then the payload will parachute down into the Atlantic Ocean to be recovered, the release says. Students then will analyze the data from the experiments.
The goal of the programs is to show students how important STEM majors are and allow them to see careers in aerospace fields, the release says.
Students in RockOn! learn the basics of building and developing scientific payloads for suborbital rocket flight, the release says. Afterward, they move to the RockSat-C program where they design and build an experiment for flight during the school year.
On June 23, the students will launch their experiments on a Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket. The launch is scheduled for 6 a.m. A broadcast on Ustream begins at 5:30 a.m. If weather prevents the launch, it will happen the following day.
The launch may only be visible in the Wallops Island area, the release says. The NASA Visitor Center will open at 5 a.m.
Quelle: The Virginian Pilot
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NASA Wallops set to launch Rocket Week
A technician walks past a large part of a dissembled rocket while it's housed in the horizontal integration facility at Virginia's spaceport at NASA Wallops on Thursday, Dec. 17, 2015. (Aileen Devlin / Daily Press)
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Rocket Week kicks off Saturday at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore, offering students and educators the chance to be immersed in the how-to's of rocketry and science payloads.
The week will include the launch of a suborbital sounding rocket to send more than 100 experiments 70 miles up into the Earth's ionosphere.
Joyce Winterton, senior adviser for education and leadership development at Wallops, said the ongoing success of the annual event shows the growing interest in STEM disciplines and careers in science, technology, engineering and math.
"We want to show the importance of STEM majors and the opportunities that are open to them — in particular, those in the aerospace fields," Winterton said in a statement Wednesday.
About 200 college students and faculty from across the country and 20 high school teachers from Virginia and other eastern states are expected to participate in three programs throughout the week.
The college participants will build and fly experiments on the rocket as part of the RockOn! and RockSat-C programs, NASA says. The high school teachers will learn how to apply rocketry basics in their curricula through the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers, or WRATs, program.
RockOn! and RockSat have been offered for nine and eight years, respectively, and WRATs for six.
RockOn! and RockSat take students from "learning to crawl, through the baby steps and then on to walking in scientific experiment development," said Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, which conducts the programs along with its Virginia counterpart and with NASA's Sounding Rocket Program.
The experiments, including more than 80 cubesats developed by middle school students in 49 states, are set to launch aboard a Terrier Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket at 6 a.m. Thursday.
NASA plans to stream the launch live beginning at 5:30 a.m., and its Visitor Center will open for public viewing at 5 a.m. The launch should only be visible in the Wallops area, NASA said.
To view the live-stream, go to ustream.tv/channel/nasa-tv-wallops.
After launching, the payload will descend by parachute into the Atlantic Ocean for retrieval. NASA said participants will have their experiments back in hand by the end of the day.
Quelle: Daily Press
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