On August 17th, 2016, NASA's Wallops Flight Facility launched a suborbital sounding rocket for the RockSat-X mission. Now...what the heck did all of that mean?
Let's break it down.
NASA's Wallops Flight Facility is an airfield and launch complex at Wallops Island, on the eastern shore of Virginia. For over 70 years this facility has conducted orbital and suborbital (see next paragraph) rocket launches for research purposes, has managed scientific balloon projects, conducted flights to the arctic to measure sea ice change, and launched drones to fly through and measure hurricanes. Most recently this facility has gained attention for being the launch site of Orbital ATK's Antares rocket which resupplies the International Space Station.
A suborbital rocket is one that launches into space but no part of that rocket stays there. Everything that goes up comes back down. Orbital rockets fly a path mostly parallel to the Earth's surface, which is how they end up in a circular orbit around the planet but suborbital rockets often fly very steep vertical trajectories. They fly as low as about 30 miles and as high as 900 miles above the Earth's surface then descend back to the surface. The upper sections of the rocket that carry the science payloads are returned to Earth under parachutes where they splash down in the ocean and are recovered by boat crews. Flights often last as little as 15 minutes.
Sounding rockets get their title from maritime tradition. In the old world of sailing ships, to "take a sounding," meant to drop a weight and length of rope into the water to measure the depth beneath your ship. So "sounding" became a synonym for "measurement." Thus, sounding rockets are simply measurement rockets. They carry a wide variety of science experiments into the upper atmosphere and the reaches of space several hundred miles above our heads for the purpose of measuring natural phenomena that only take place there, to make brief observations of astronomical targets, or sometimes to run brief experiments in microgravity while the rocket is in free-fall back to Earth. The variety of subjects to measure and ideas to test is so extensive that NASA's Wallops Flight Facility has conducted over 16,000 sounding rocket flights.
RockSat-X is a cooperative program where several universities conduct their experiments on the same rocket flight--in this case it was a rocket called a Terrier-Improved Malemute. No, this is not a new dog breed mix, it's a combination of a Terrier booster rocket and a Malemute upper stage. (No, I don't know how they got those names) This particular flight included experiments that observed crystal growth in microgravity, observed how a molten blob of metal cools and reshapes in microgravity, tested the strength and effectiveness of 3D printed airfoil shapes, detected and collected micrometeroids, and a set of HD cameras to watch the deployment of all of these experiments and more. RockSat-X reached 95 miles in altitude and many of the experiments returned their data via radio but unfortunately the upper stage with the experiment hardware was not able to be recovered which means that some of the physical experiments could not be examined in person. For more detailed info on this mission just click here.
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