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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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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