Spirit Rocket Presentation (POSTPONED)

Event Coordinator

Mr. Jason Hoffman

Event Context

Date

11/04/2005

Description

*** IMPORTANT ***

This event has been postponed because the Penn State students who were scheduled to present it had unexpected scheduling conflicts. We may try to reschedule this event sometime in the Spring.

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WHEN:   POSTPONED
WHERE:   Room 202  (Mr. Hoffman's Physics Lab)
WHO:   All West Branch students and teachers are invited to attend

Several Penn State students who are members of the Spirit Rocket project team will be visiting West Branch to give a presentation on the Spirit Rocket project. Later this year, the Engineering Club could schedule a field trip to visit the Spirit Rocket lab facilities at Penn State. Anyone who might be interested in going on the field trip should attend this presentation to get an overview of what the Spirit Rocket project is all about.

SPIRIT provides the opportunity for Penn State students from a wide range of educational backgrounds to gain hands-on experience in the design and fabrication of a research sounding rocket. The 30-month project, part of the NASA Student Launch Program, enhances classroom experience while emphasizing creativity, collaborative learning and time management skills. Members of SPIRIT are constructing a rocket that will deploy experiments to measure temperature in the mesosphere, the middle layer of the atmosphere.

More than 50 Penn State undergraduate students have collaborated with Penn State faculty and NASA engineers to accomplish their goals. Ranging from freshmen to seniors and from electrical, mechanical and aerospace engineering to public relations and education majors, the students have diverse interests and backgrounds.

Students from SUNY-Geneseo and Lincoln University have also contributed to the project. The Geneseo students have designed and fabricated one of the five atmospheric experiments.

To accomplish the major tasks to ensure the success of the rocket, students organized into five groups --  experiments, power and wiring, publicity and outreach, structures and telemetry. 

What is a Sounding Rocket?

The 36-foot, two-stage, NASA Nike-Orion rocket will reach an apogee, or highest point, of 75 miles.  During its ascent the on-board experiments will begin to record measurements. Some will deploy from the rocket and others will register data from inside of the rocket. After reaching apogee, the rocket will descend with its parachute opening up 15-20 km above the earth. The parachute will slow the rocket's plunge into the Atlantic Ocean, where it will be retrieved by the U.S. Coast Guard. NASA will test a new recovery module during the SPIRIT flight that will allow it to recover and re-use payloads.

For more information, please visit:   http://spirit.ee.psu.edu