NASA rocket carries Hawaii community college students’ experiment into space
NASA WALLOPS/TERRY ZAPERACH
UH community college students watch a NASA rocket launch their experiment into space.
COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII
The NASA rocket lifted off from Wallops Flight Facility today.
COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII
In attendance were Professor Joe Ciotti, UH community college students Quinn-Patrick O’Malley, Caleb Yuen, Frank Bolanos, IV and Jared Estrada and Honolulu Community College Associate Professor Shidong Kan.
An experiment designed and built by students from two University of Hawaii community colleges was among six college science experiments launched into suborbital space today aboard a NASA rocket.
Windward Community College students designed and built a camphor-powered sublimation rocket that was deployed near the peak of the NASA rocket’s flight, at approximately 91 miles altitude.
The Honolulu Community College students designed a camera system and inertial measurement unit devices to monitor the sublimation rocket’s motion.
The launch of the 44-foot sounding rocket at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia was originally scheduled for Tuesday but was delayed twice, by bad weather and sea conditions.
Posts on the official Twitter for NASA Wallops said the sounding rocket took off today with the student experiments for the RockSat-X program at 6:09 pm Eastern time, or 12:09 p.m. Hawaii time. “The rocket carried the experiments to an altitude of 99 miles before descending via a parachute and landing in the Atlantic Ocean,” one tweet said. The students will receive their flown experiments and any stored data after the payload is recovered from the ocean.
