College Students can Apply Now for NASA Summer Rocket Workshop Building a Payload to Fly on a Rocket into Space

Interested in learning how to build scientific experiments for spaceflight on rockets? A NASA program has the answers. NASA is inviting any interested faculty or students at colleges and universities to participate in “RockOn 2013.”

The program, taking place this summer from June 15-20 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is an annual workshop, through a partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia designed to help students build experiments to fly into space.

“Now in its sixth year, this program provides the basics on building, testing and flying a science payload on a suborbital rocket,” said Phil Eberspeaker, chief of the sounding rocket program office at Wallops. “This is an exciting first step for participants to gain hands-on experience in building more complex space experiments. The program provides students with a solid foundation on which to build a future aerospace career.”

Registration is open through May and for those participating, they will have the opportunity to work together to build experiment payloads to fly on a NASA sounding rocket predicted to reach an altitude of 73 miles. The rocket flight is scheduled for launch on June 20, the last day of the workshop.

“The purpose of the program is to bring together university students and instructors, and introduce them to building scientific experiments for space flight,” said Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. “We really get into the basics of building experiments, including developing circuit boards, programming flight code and working together as a cohesive team on space projects.”

Those interested in the rocket program can register online by going to: http://spacegrant.colorado.edu/national-programs/rockon-2013-home/