“The students had to prove that the probe (which protrudes a few inches from the rocket) won’t fall off during flight and damage the rocket. “Safety is of course paramount,” Maruca said. With support from the Delaware Space Grant Consortium, UD had teams in both events this year. The programs give students a chance to experience what it’s like to prepare experiments that meet NASA’s exacting specifications. RockSat-C is a nine-month project in which students design and build their own experiments. They assemble a kit for a Geiger counter that flies on the rocket. Students in the RockOn program participate in a one-week workshop for students with little or no experience. More than 30 university teams were set to participate in the June launch - through the RockOn and RockSat-C programs. Since 1959, NASA-sponsored space and earth science research has used sounding rockets to test instruments in lower altitudes for later use in satellites and spacecraft that go deeper into space.) (Sounding rockets take their name from the nautical term "to sound," which means to take measurements. This week’s forecast appears favorable so far and the launch window extends to Friday, Aug. 16, was originally scheduled in June but was scrubbed because of unfavorable weather conditions. Maruca’s students have such an instrument - a Langmuir probe - ready for launch into the ionosphere aboard a sounding rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. But fortunately, he said, the ionosphere’s ever-changing structure can be measured by instruments carried through it on rockets. Free electrons are moving around in this plasma environment, having broken away from atoms charged by solar radiation, and all of those moving charged particles can have a big impact on communication and navigation systems - on the ground, in the air and in space, Maruca said. The ionosphere starts about 30 miles above the Earth’s surface and extends hundreds of miles to the edge of space. Such is the case if you are a student of Bennett Maruca, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware, who studies space physics and plasma physics.įor the past three years, Maruca’s undergraduate students have been designing, building and testing devices to help them understand plasma in a region of the Earth’s upper atmosphere called the “ionosphere.” Some of it must happen far beyond the beaten path. Plenty of research happens in labs, at computer stations, in libraries and coffee shops and in fields of many kinds.
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