NASA rocket carries Hawaii students’ experiment into space

An experiment designed and built by students from two University of Hawaii community colleges was among six college-student science experiments launched into suborbital space this week aboard a NASA rocket.

Students from Windward Community College developed a camphor-powered sublimation rocket that was deployed Thursday near the peak of the NASA rocket’s flight over the Atlantic Ocean. The system converts the camphor to gas to propel the small, lightweight rocket.

Also, a group of Honolulu Community College students designed a camera system and inertial measurement unit devices to monitor the sublimation rocket’s motion.

The entire payload, almost entirely encased in aluminum, was less than a foot long and weighed less than 15 pounds, according to a UH news release.

After watching the dramatic launch of the 44-foot research rocket at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, participating Windward student Jared Estrada called it “an amazing spectacle that served as a crowning achievement for the scientific endeavors of Project Imua,” the Hawaii team that created the experiment.

“I think the public needs to know that Project Imua represents an amazing opportunity for students to get involved in the engineering and scientific process, and that ultimately the project does great work in its research and development,” Estrada added.

Project Imua is a joint faculty-student enterprise involving several UH community colleges in affiliation with the Hawai‘i Space Grant Consortium. Its primary mission is to experiment with high-power rocketry and to design and fabricate small payloads for spaceflight. Undergraduates gain real-world, project-based learning opportunities in STEM, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The six experiments on the rocket were developed by college teams across the nation and flown via the RockSat-X program, which gives students at post-secondary institutions the experience of building experiments for spaceflight, in conjunction with the Colorado Space Grant Consortium.

“RockSat-X provides students an opportunity to improve their skills through experiment development and then analyzing their data following the launch,” Giovanni Rosanova, chief of the Sounding Rockets Program Office at Wallops, said in a news release. “Programs like these are vital in preparing students for careers after graduation.”

The launch originally was scheduled for Tuesday but was delayed twice, by bad weather and sea conditions. Seventy-five of the 120 students participating in this year’s RockSat-X program were in Virginia to help get their experiments integrated into the rocket and watch its launch.

Posts on the official Twitter account for NASA Wallops said the research rocket took off Thursday with the student experiments at 6:09 p.m. 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.

It was the fourth time that a UH Project Imua payload was launched into space. The first Project Imua payload was launched from Wallops in 2015.