Students And Educators Attending NASA's Rocket University

Sonja Alexander               

Headquarters, Washington                                    

 

Keith Koehler

Wallops Flight Facility, Va.

Chris Koehler

Colorado Space Grant Consortium, Boulder

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia will become Rocket University June 18 - 25

as nearly 125 high school educators and university students and instructors spend the week learning about rocketry and conducting science experiments in space.

During the week NASA will conduct the fourth annual RockOn! workshop for university level participants and the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students (WRATS) for high schoolteachers.

Joyce Winterton, senior advisor for education and leadership development at Wallops, said "This week will provide opportunities for students and educators to gain hands-on experiences in science, technology, engineering and math and expand our educational pipeline to bring students into STEM careers."

RockOn!, conducted with the Colorado and Virginia and Space Grant Consortia, is designed to provide participants an introductory session in building small experiments that can be launched on sounding rockets.

The nearly 30 participants will build standardized experiments that will fly on a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket set to launch between 6 and 10 a.m. EDT on June 23. The 35-foot-tall rocket is expected to fly to an altitude of 75 miles. After launch and payload recovery, the participants will conduct preliminary data analysis and discuss their results.

In addition to the nine workshop-built experiments, eight custom-built, self-contained experiments also will fly on the rocket inside a payload canister known as RockSat-C. These experiments were developed at universities that previously had participated in a RockOn! workshop.

University participants in RockSat-X who are flying four custom-built experiments in July from Wallops also will be in attendance. These universities had previously participated in RockSat-C.

The inaugural WRATS program will give high school teachers a technical flight experience to reinforce STEM concepts they teach in their classrooms. During the week, 20 teachers from 13 states will learn about the dynamics of rocketry and the science gained from suborbital sounding rockets. They also will attend the NASA sounding rocket launch on June 23.

The Teaching From Space office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston is partnering with the Wallops Flight Facility on the WRATS program. The program continues NASA's investment in the nation's education programs by supporting the goal of attracting and retaining students in STEM disciplines critical to future space exploration.

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

The RockOn! workshop is supported by the NASA Sounding Rocket Program, 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.

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Preparing for the Future

NASA continued preparations for the future of space exploration with the installation of a 35,000-gallon liquid oxygen tank atop the A-3 Test Stand under construction at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The 300-foot tall stand is being built to test next-generation rocket engines capable of carrying humans beyond low-Earth orbit into deep space. Construction of the stand began in 2007, with completion and activation scheduled for 2013. The A-3 stand is the first large test structure built at Stennis since a trio of stands were constructed in the 1960s to test the massive Saturn V rocket stages used to carry humans to the moon during the Apollo Program.

Image Credit: NASA

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Upper Stage Engine Ready For Testing At NASA's Stennis Space Center

Michael Braukus/J.D. Harrington

Headquarters, Washington                                        

 

Rebecca Strecker

Stennis Space Center, Miss.

 

Jennifer Stanfield

Marshall Space Flight Center, Ala.

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- NASA's new J-2X rocket engine, which could power the upper stage of the nation's future heavy-lift launch vehicle, is ready for its first round of testing. The fully assembled engine was installed Saturday in the A-2 Test Stand at the agency's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

Beginning in mid-June, the engine will undergo a series of 10 test firings that will last several months.

"An upper stage engine is essential to making space exploration outside low-Earth orbit a reality," said Mike Kynard, manager of the J-2X upper stage engine project at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "The J-2X goes beyond the limits of its historic predecessor and achieves higher thrust, performance, and reliability than the J2. We are thrilled to have the engine in the test stand to validate our assumptions about engine performance and reliability."

The test stand, which supported the space shuttle main engine project, has been modified to accommodate the J-2X engine's different shape. In addition to the structural, electrical and plumbing modifications, a new engine start system was installed and control systems were upgraded on the stand. The liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen transfer lines that dated back to the 1960s were replaced.

Fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, the J-2X engine will generate 294,000 pounds of thrust in its primary operating mode to propel a spacecraft into low-Earth orbit.

By changing the mixture ratio of liquid oxygen to liquid hydrogen, the J–2X can operate in a secondary mode of 242,000 pounds of thrust required to power a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit to the moon, an asteroid or other celestial destination. The J-2X can start and restart in space to support a variety of mission requirements.

"We are excited to have a new engine in the A-2 Test Stand," said Gary Benton, manager of the J-2X engine testing project at Stennis. "Installation of the J-2X engine marks the beginning of the third major rocket engine test project on this historic stand."

The A-2 Test Stand originally was used to test Saturn V rocket stages for NASA's Apollo Program. In the mid-1970s, the stand was modified from Apollo Program parameters to allow testing of space shuttle main engines.

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne of Canoga Park, Calif., designed and built the J-2X for NASA.

To learn more about the J-2X engine, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/j2x/.

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Countdown to Endeavour: Launch Attempt Number Two

By Carla Voorhees

Kathy Winters is an Air Force Civilian Meteorologist at the 45th Weather Squadron at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. She is the Space Shuttle Launch Weather Officer providing weather support to the Space Shuttle Program at Kennedy Space Center as the Launch Team prepares for the 29 April 2011 launch of Endeavour. You can find out more about the 45th Space Wing at their Facebook page.

We are getting ready for launch again. The NASA team replaced and re-tested the Load Control Assembly-2 in the aft section of the vehicle, and we are back in the 3-day countdown. Today we issued the launch forecast, Ice Team Forecast, Solid Rocket Booster Recovery forecast, and I briefed weather to the Launch Director and at the Countdown Status press conference. Like I mentioned before, this is like a “do-over.” We have the same forecasts to accomplish during the days prior to launch. Since this is now a morning launch (8:56 AM Eastern Daylight Savings Time), the schedule shifts a bit, and we actually started issuing launch forecasts on Thursday, L-4 days before launch rather than L-3 days. We will basically be working a night shift for launch, but our Launch Weather Team has required crew rest rules to ensure everyone is sharp for their launch shift.

We are, again, expecting weather to impact the pre-launch operations. Sunday, a front will move into Florida, and we are concerned about thunderstorms in the area for the Rotating Service Structure (RSS) retract operations. This happened during our last launch attempt, and the team had to wait 5 hours to rotate the RSS. Since the Shuttle team knew the weather was going to be a problem, they did some ‘get-ahead’ work and were still able to begin tanking on time. Hopefully the weather won’t delay them 5 hours again! Still, I am sending regular exposure forecasts to the team so they can plan operations around the weather. Luckily, by launch morning, the weather improves. We are forecasting a 30% chance of local weather prohibiting launch due to a possible crosswind violation at the Shuttle landing facility for the Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort landing weather and potential for a low-cloud ceiling. Overall, the weather is favorable. Hopefully we will launch as scheduled Monday because the weather looks worse for Tuesday morning as another front moves into Florida.

In addition to launch preparations, we also preparing for hurricane season which begins 1 June! We are preparing a simulation for the Kennedy Space Center Senior Staff as well as well as several briefings to KSC emergency managers and the Shuttle team. The last Shuttle launch vehicle, STS-135 Atlantis, will be on the launch pad during hurricane season, and the Shuttle team is well prepared with detailed timelines of the schedule required to prepare and roll back the Shuttle if a hurricane threatens the area. This is not a quick process! Just preparing for the roll takes almost 2 days, and the roll itself takes 6 hours.  When we have a storm threatening the area, we work closely with the National Hurricane Center to provide as much information to the Shuttle team as possible so they can determine the best course of action.

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NASA Offers Students And Teachers Flight Experiences

Ann Marie Trotta

Headquarters, Washington

 

Rebecca Powell     

Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. -- Students and educators nationwide will have the opportunity to interact with NASA engineers and scientists through two newly developed NASA flight initiatives.

The programs, developed at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, are designed to give students and educators hands-on flight experiences using NASA sounding rockets and scientific balloons.

The Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students (WRATS) will provide high school participants with a technical flight experience to reinforce science, technology, engineering and mathematics concepts. Teachers and students will participate in person or virtually in authentic, hands-on experiences based on NASA's sounding rocket engineering and science data collection. WRATS will include interactive Web based data to give students and educators lessons in physics and engineering. Teachers also receive resources to integrate the data into classroom lessons.

Selected participants in other NASA education projects will have the opportunity to attend a rocketry flight week June 19 - 24, at Wallops. Participants will learn about the dynamics of launch, safe flight operations and view a NASA Terrier-Orion sounding rocket liftoff on Thursday, June 23.

The Wallops Balloon Experience for Educators (WBEE) provides opportunities for high school teachers to fly experiments on scientific flights. WBEE will build upon an existing partnership between NASA and the Louisiana Space Consortium, which has developed student outreach programs, including the High Altitude Space Platform (HASP) and Louisiana Aerospace Catalyst Experiences for Students (LaACES).

Since 2002, the programs have flown multiple missions involving hundreds of students in undergraduate though post-graduate programs. WBEE will expand the LaACES platform into secondary education with a focus on core principles and future partnership with educators and their institutions.

WBEE will involve teams of selected educators who have participated in other NASA education projects. They will visit the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, for a week-long workshop in July. Participants will be involved in classroom and hands-on balloon science activities. The teams will have the opportunity to build and test their own science payload for a flight to the edge of space under the direction of NASA and Louisiana Space Consortium personnel.

The WBEE experience culminates with the launch of these payloads aboard a NASA scientific balloon. WBEE will be an intensive course involving a broad-based learning experience educators may implement at their home schools.

The Teaching From Space office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston is partnering with Wallops to provide the flights. The program continues NASA's investment in the nation's education programs by supporting the goal of attracting and retaining students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines critical to future space exploration.

For information about WRATS and WBEE, visit http://education.wff.nasa.gov/.

For information about NASA's Teaching From Space program, visit  www.nasa.gov/education/tfs.

For information about NASA's broad range of education programs, visit www.nasa.gov/education.

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Topping Out

With the placement of the test cell dome atop NASA's new A-3 Test Stand at the John C. Stennis Space Center, the project met another milestone on April 13, 2011. Placement of the dome also is known as 'topping out.'

NASA broke ground in 2007 for the new stand, which is being built to provide simulated high-altitude testing for next-generation rocket engines that will carry humans into deep space. The stand will use a series of chemical steam generators to create a vacuum that allows operators to test full-scale engines at simulated altitudes up to 100,000 feet. The A-3 stand is the first large test structure to be built at Stennis since the facility was established to test the Saturn V rocket stages that helped carry Apollo astronauts to the moon and is scheduled for activation in 2013.

Image Credit: NASA/Danny Nowlin

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