Delaware Students Attend NASA Wallops Workshop

Undergraduate students from DSU and UD participate in a NASA program!

Undergraduate students from Delaware State University and the University of Delaware have been participating in the RockON! and RockSat-C NASA programs for years now. Just recently students got to experience a week of engaging and incredibly interesting workshops hosted by NASA at the Wallops Flight Center.

What are RockON! and RockSat-C

These programs give student’s access to a Sounding Rocket, these rockets are small but powerful and are packed full of experiments. This program gives students the ability to put their own experiments into space. An absolutely incredible experience and a valuable learning opportunity for anyone involved.

RockON!

RockON! is a week-long workshop hosted by the NASA Wallops Flight Facility (WFF). Students from around the country travel to the beautiful town of Chincoteague, Virginia. Students are eager to begin working on a payload designed to run inside of a sounding rocket mission.

The first step in the WFF student sounding rocket program is for teams to gain experience with building a payload designed for a sounding rocket. To gain this experience all of the teams are given the same experiment to build. This allows the students to gain engineering experience in a controlled, yet fun and engaging environment. This is designed to provide introductory hands-on engineering and flight mission experience for students and their professors/mentors; who may be interested in Space flight and engineering experiments for Space.

RockStat-C

The second stage of the WFF program is RockStat-C. This program gives students an almost complete autonomy over the experiment they wish to fly on the sounding rocket launched at WFF. To keep in touch with NASA and the specifications for the program, teams complete monthly review panels with NASA. These panels ensure that their payloads are compliant and will contribute to the success of the mission.

The RockStat-C program is started in the fall, and takes nine months for teams to build and validate their payloads. Their nine months of hard work comes to a culmination with a launch of a sounding rocket at WFF during the summer.

The Launch

Once the RockSat-C teams and RockON! teams all arrive at the Wallops Flight Facility for the summer program, it is time to load up the rocket.

Because all of the RockON! and RockSat-C teams share space on the same sounding rocket, they view the launch at the same time. They are also given the opportunity to view the integration of all of the experiments into the rocket.

As the experiments are integrated into the rocket, students are able to see as different levels of testing are completed to ensure the success of the mission. Once this is all complete, Students are able to see a complete view of flight mission operations within a NASA facility.

NASA engineers preparing for Spin Test of the rocket. Ensuring the balance of the rocket. Students are given access to testing room for observation

Delaware RockStat-C Team

The University of Delaware RockStat-C team is led by Professor Ben Maruca as a mentor since 2019. This team has decided to design and construct a Langmuir Probe. The team has successfully flown their probe twice in previous years. The team hopes to fly their probe for a third time coming the end of summer 2023.

University of Delaware RockSat-C team ready to integrate their payload into the rocket at NASA Wallops Flight Facility. Left to right Miguel Mercado, Allison Fantom, Nick Ulizio, Isaac Chandler, Dax Moraes, Bennett Maruca, TJ Kaifer, Jarod Dagney
University of Delaware students assembling and integrating their payload.
University of Delaware team presenting their experiment to other RockSat-C teams and RockON! students at NASA Wallops Flight Facility.