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The RockOn and RockSat-C student flight programs will take flight from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, early Thursday morning, June 22.
While a map has not yet been released, the launch is visible in states across the Eastern Seaboard.
The following college teams from the DMV are participating in the programs:
RockOn
- Shenandoah University, VA
- Laurel Ridge Community College, VA
- Morgan State University, MD
- University of Maryland College Park, MD
- Bridgewater State University, MA
- University of Maryland Eastern Shore, MD
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech), VA
RockSat-C
- Old Dominion University, VA
- Temple University, PA
This is the 15th year that NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program has supported flight opportunities for the RockOn and RockSat-C programs, which provide students a hands-on opportunity to develop flight experiments, NASA said. The programs are managed by Wallops’ Directorate Education team, which assumed responsibility of the nationwide program from the Colorado Space Grant Consortium in 2022.
The student experiments will fly to more than 70 miles in altitude spending several minutes in suborbital space before returning to Earth where they will be recovered in the Atlantic Ocean. The students will recover their experiments from the payload and begin data analysis.
NASA's Sounding Rocket Program is conducted at the agency's Wallops Flight Facility, which is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA's Heliophysics Division manages the sounding rocket program for the agency.
In addition to the university payloads, some 80 additional experiments will take flight as part of the Cubes in Space program, which partners with Wallops to provide flight opportunities for students aged 11 to 18, NASA said.
The experiments will fly on a Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket. Live coverage of the mission is scheduled to begin at 5:10 a.m. on the Wallops YouTube site. Launch updates also are available via the Wallops Facebook and Twitter sites. The Wallops Visitor Center will be open for launch viewing opening at 4:30 a.m.
Click here for the full list of participating schools.
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