On June 25 at 13:32 UTC, a two-stage, Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket launched one hundred student payloads from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Sponsored by the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortiums, the launch was part of the annual RockSat-C program which is currently in its thirteenth year. According to a NASA press release on the program: [p]articipants in RockOn! receive instruction on the basics required to develop a scientific payload for flight on a suborbital rocket. After learning the basics in RockOn!, students may then participate in RockSat-C, where during the school year they design and build a more complicated experiment for rocket flight.”

Because of the impacts of COVID-19, the usual in-person learning workshop at Wallops had to be done virtually after the 2020 edition was postponed. Chris Kohler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, stated that: One big advantage of the virtual process is that participants worked in small teams or individually at their own pace.

This led to an increase in payloads from previous years, from 28 payloads in both 2018 and 2019 to 66 this year. The students built so many payloads, covering everything from acceleration, humidity, pressure, and temperature to radiation counts, that they could only fit 32 in the space available. The 34 remaining payloads will be launched into the stratosphere this fall on a large balloon. When that happens, we’ll tell you about it here on Daily Space.

More Information

NASA 2021 press release

NASA 2019 press release

NASA 2018 press release

Launch video