NASA on Wednesday said it lost the payload of a suborbital rocket carrying student experiments — including one designed by University of Hawaii students — as it returned to Earth, a rare occurrence that’s being investigated.

The 20-foot-long tube carried high-definition cameras, various gauges, and antennas from eight universities and community colleges from across the country. It was launched atop a rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility near Virginia’s Chincoteague Island and reached an altitude of about 95 miles before it descended toward the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA spokesman Keith Koehler said data were received from most of the experiments during the flight. A parachute was supposed to open at about 20,000 feet, but it’s unclear whether that happened, he said.

Typically, such payloads float in the ocean and are spotted by aircraft before a ship recovers them, Koehler said.

“We don’t know why we couldn’t find it,” he said. “It’s a big ocean. They’re going to have go through the data and determine what happened.”

Sixteen students from Honolulu, Windward, Kapiolani and Kauai community colleges had spent the past year designing and building a small experiment package, or payload, for launch into space as part of Wednesday’s launch. Hawaii’s payload, dubbed Project Imua, contained six different experiments and was outfitted with five microcomputers — ranging from the size of a credit card to the size of a stick of gum — and tiny cameras capable of capturing images and video.

Half of the team of students traveled to Virginia for the launch.

Windward Community College student Madori Rumpungworn said in a phone interview from Wallops that she was still in shock from the news that the payloads hadn’t been recovered. She had helped build a small sublimation-powered rocket designed to use mothballs as its fuel, which was attached to the payload. (Sublimation is the transition of a substance from a solid directly into a gas.)

“When they first told us the news … that our payload was lost, the room was still — you could hear a pin drop,” said Rumpungworn, who is studying mechanical engineering. The students were told the experiments were likely sitting at the bottom of a very deep canyon on the ocean floor.

“I’m not entirely bummed, because it doesn’t speak to the whole experience. It just speaks to one part of it and we knew this was a possibility,” she said. “Overall, I’m still really happy and excited to have this opportunity and this whole experience.”

Darlyne McLeod, who is studying electronic technology at Kauai Community College, helped work on a neutron detector on the payload. Neutrons, like electrons and protons, are particles that make up most atoms. She said she found comfort in stories from career scientists at NASA who shared some of their experiences with missions that didn’t go as planned.

“I’m sad that the payload didn’t get retrieved, but it goes to show that this wasn’t so coddled that nothing could go wrong,” McLeod said. “This is what happens in real life, and we just had it happen to us.”

Project manager Joe Ciotti, a professor of physics, astronomy and mathematics at Windward Community College, said he doesn’t view the mission as a failure.

“This is real rocket science. There are great risks involved, calculated risks,” he said from Wallops. “It’s part of the field that we’re in. If you’re not willing to take risks, then you’re not an explorer.”

Ciotti said the project was “literally priceless, given the amount of ingenuity and sweat” poured in by the students. But by one financial measure, it cost the team $14,000 to “buy” a spot on the rocket.

Project Imua is funded by a two-year $500,000 grant awarded to the Hawaii NASA Space Grant Consortium by the NASA Space Grant Competitive Opportunity for Partnerships with Community Colleges and Technical Schools.

Koehler, the NASA spokesman, said payloads have been lost before, although such events are unusual. For instance, he said, NASA launched some instruments to study the atmosphere from Puerto Rico in the 1990s. They weren’t recovered until five years later when they washed ashore.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.