Contact: Jack Bailey (304) 766-4109 jbaile19@wvstateu.edu
INSTITUTE, W.Va. – West Virginia State University (WVSU) students participated in a successful launch of a NASA suborbital sounding rocket at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in August.
More than 100 students from over 15 universities and community colleges around the U.S. collaborated to design, build and launch experiments into space as part of the RockSat-X program, which allows students to build their own experimental payloads and launch them on a NASA sounding rocket.
“The purpose of the experiment was to measure radiation levels during the flight, detect the direction of high energy particles, and measure flight dynamics such as acceleration and rotation rate, the strength of Earth’s magnetic field, and its direction and ozone concentrations during the descent,” said WVSU Physics Professor Dr. Marek Krasnansky.
The payload flew to an altitude of 94 miles during its suborbital flight. It descended by parachute and landed in the Atlantic Ocean, where it was recovered for the data to be analyzed.
Sponsored by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, NASA’s RockSat-X program introduces secondary institution students to building experiments for space flight and requires them to expand their skills to develop and build more complex projects as they progress through the program.
Participating WVSU students included James Davis, Caleb Eskins, Justin Graham, Jacob Moore, Jonathan Musselwhite, Saira Rizwan, Umer Rizwan, Danford Smith, Justin Spradling and Jaime Veronda.
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