UW ROCKET SCIENCE CLASS SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCH EXPERIMENTS TO SPACE ON NASA ROCKET

Contact: Paul Johnson, 307-766-6150; pjohnson@uwyo.edu

Nearly 100 university instructors and students from 21 states saw their experiments rise to the sky at 5:30 a.m. on the morning of June 26 with the successful launch of a NASA suborbital sounding rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. During the past week, the students have been at Wallops preparing their experiments through a week-long RockOn/RockSat workshop.

The two-stage Terrier-Orion rocket carried the experiments to an altitude of 73 miles. The experiments were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and the students successfully retrieved data from their experiments.

Senior undergraduates taking "Rocket Science" at the University of Wyoming, taught by Professor Paul Johnson, were participants. Professor Johnson (UW Dept. of Physics and Astronomy) and senior engineering and physics students: Antohony Allais (Rock Springs), Kyle Fox (Laramie), Sean King (Casper), Jeff Parkins (Laramie), James Richey (Loveland), and Jacob Thatcher (Laramie) traveled to Wallops to launch two payloads, testing innovative electrical, computer,and mechanical payload designs. Four other students, Erich Lichtfuss (Loveland), Luke Voss (Laramie), Justin Thornton (Littleton), and Anne-Marie Suriano (Auburn Hills, Michigan), participated in the design and fabrication phases of the project. All of the University of Wyoming experiments were designed and built by student teams from basic parts with their own designs, with consulting from Professors Scott Morton (UW Mechanical Engineering) and Stanley Legowski (Electrical Engineering). Several of the engineering students stated that "We've taken a lot of engineering courses, but this is the first time that we put it all together and really learned how to be an engineer."

The program is conducted in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia with support from NASA. Travel support was provided by the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium, the Departments of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, the University of Wyoming Foundation, the College of Engineering, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the College of Arts and Sciences. The purpose of the Rocket Science Class is to teach engineering and science students how to work together independently in multidisciplinary teams to develop an experiment that will successfully fly into space.

Access to photos provided on request to pjohnson@uwyo.edu