Education, Rocketry, Rockets

Rocket Week at NASA Wallops – students/educator build payloads for sounding rockets

An announcement from NASA Wallops:

Students and Teachers Become Rocket Scientists at
NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility

WASHINGTON — More than 120 students and educators will delve into the world of rocket science June 15-21 during Rocket Week at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Activities during the week will include a RockOn! workshop for 50 university and community college-level participants, and the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students (WRATS) for a high school audience. All attendees will participate in a sounding rocket launch scheduled between 5:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. EDT June 20.

“Rocket Week brings together students and teachers from across the country to experience first-hand the exciting world of rocketry,” said Joyce Winterton, senior advisor for education and leadership development at Wallops. “For students, it provides them valuable experience to blend with academics for their future STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers. The educators gain valuable experience to expand their curriculum in the classroom and mentor students for STEM majors and careers.”

RockOn! Introduces participants to building small experiments that can be launched on suborbital sounding rockets. Now in its sixth year, the workshop is conducted in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia.

“Working with NASA, we have developed a step approach to expand the skills needed for students to enter STEM careers,” said Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. “RockOn! is the first step, followed by RockSat-C and then RockSat-X. Each step is technically more challenging than the previous one, allowing the students to expand the skills needed to support the aerospace industry.”

The RockOn! participants will build standardized experiments to be launched on a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket. The 35-foot-tall rocket is expected to fly to an altitude of about 75 miles. After launch and payload recovery, the participants will conduct preliminary data analysis and discuss their results.

Nine custom-built Rocksat-C experiments, developed at universities that previously participated in a RockOn! Workshop, also will fly inside a payload canister on the rocket. About 50 students who designed and built the experiments will be attend Rocket Week.

Also attending will be university participants in RockSat-X. They are previous Rocksat-C participants who will fly six custom-built experiments aboard a sounding rocket from Wallops in August.

In the WRATS program, 20 high school teachers from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and the District of Columbia will learn about the dynamics of rocketry and the science gained from suborbital sounding rockets to reinforce STEM concepts they teach in their classrooms. They also will attend the planned sounding rocket launch.

These programs continue NASA’s investment in the nation’s education programs by supporting the goal of attracting and retaining students in STEM disciplines critical to the future of space exploration.

For more information about the WRATS programs, visit:  http://education.wff.nasa.gov

The RockOn! and WRATS workshops are supported by NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program. RockOn! also is supported by NASA’s Office of Education and NASA’s National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia.

For more information on RockOn! and RockSat, visit: http://spacegrant.colorado.edu/rockon

For more information about NASA’s education programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/education

Space Music, Space Systems

Video: Ugly Duckling “Elevation” rocks ATV Albert Einstein

The hip hop group Ugly Duckling “elevates” the ESA ATV Albert Einstein to the ISS:

For the 2013 Automated Transfer Vehicle docking day music video, ESA teamed up with California hip hop group Ugly Duckling (http://www.uglyduckling.us), who have produced a super space remix of Elevation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcbSiq…).

Rock along to the beats of DJ Young Einstein and the visuals of ATV Albert Einstein!

Follow the ATV mission to the ISS via http://blogs.esa.int/atv

Music, lyrics and original video animation Copyright (C) Ugly Duckling (http://www.uglyduckling.us) 2012-13.
ESA remix video credit ESA/European Space Agency, used with permission.

Activism, DIY space, Space participation

Space Hacker Workshop – Dallas, Texas July 20-21, 2013

An announcement from Citizens in Space:

Citizen Science and Space Exploration in the Lone Star State
Space Hacker Workshop to Take Place in Dallas

Dallas, TX (June 14, 2013) – Space isn’t just for governments and large corporations.

Citizen scientists and hardware hackers will learn how to do “space on the cheap” at a two-day Space Hacker Workshop in Dallas. Participants at the workshop will learn how they can build and fly experiments in space, and even fly in space as citizen astronauts, through the Citizens in Space program.

The Space Hacker Workshop takes place July 20-21 at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field.  The workshop is sponsored by Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, and SpaceGAMBIT, an international collaboration of citizen scientists operating through makerspaces, hackerspaces, and community groups.

Citizens in Space has purchased 10 flights on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft, now under construction at the Mojave Air and Space Port, which will be made available to the citizen-science community.

“We’re looking for 100 citizen-science experiments and 10 citizen astronauts to fly as payload operators,” Citizens in Space project manager Edward Wright said. “The Space Hacker Workshop will provide participants with information and skills needed to take advantage of our free flight opportunities.

“This is an opportunity for citizen scientists to develop and test new technologies in space, to collect microorganisms from the extreme upper atmosphere, to experiment with new processes for creating new materials; and do many more cool things.”

Space is no longer the exclusive domain of NASA and university scientists. A previous Space Hacker Workshop in California attracted a standing-room crowd of men and women from every walk of life. High-school students sat next to medical doctors and astrobiologists. Tinkers and hobbyists worked alongside engineers and physics professors, a heart surgeon, and a NASA astronaut.

“These are the makers of space,” said one participant at the California workshop. “This event is about making and doing, rather than talking and talking.”

“Thanks to modern technology, citizen scientists can build and fly fully functioning space experiments for a few hundred dollars or less, ” Wright said. “With components available at Radio Shack or Fry’s Electronics, citizen scientists can build instruments and experiments with more power than a NASA satellite from a few years back. ”

The Space Hacker Workshop will provide hands-on exposure to a variety of microcontrollers, sensors, imaging systems, and other components. With these components, participants will learn how to design and build microgravity, fluid-physics, life-science, and engineering experiments. Each paid participant will receive a hardware package to take home after the workshop.

Khaki Rodway of XCOR Aerospace will be on hand to discuss the Lynx spacecraft. Experts from NASA and industry will discuss the research professional scientists have done in the past, prospects for new research on low-cost suborbital spacecraft such as Lynx, and opportunities for citizen scientists to build on the shoulders of NASA giants.

Three citizen-astronaut candidates will also be on hand, to discuss the Citizens in Space astronaut selection and training process.

Admission for the event is $129 at the door. Super Early Bird tickets are available now for $79. Tickets are limited and the event may sell out. Online registration is available at spacehackerdfw.eventbrite.com.

Everyone can participate in space