Nearly 100 university instructors and students from 21 states saw their experiments rise to the sky at 5:30 a.m. June 26, 2009, with the successful launch of a NASA suborbital sounding rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Carthage physics and computer science professor Kevin Crosby was among the participants who spent a week at Wallops preparing their experiments in the RockOn/RockSat workshop.

The two-stage Terrier-Orion rocket carried the experiments to an altitude of 73 miles. The experiments were recovered and the researchers successfully retrieved data from their experiments.

Prof. Crosby worked on a payload experiment to measure radiation levels through the atmosphere and in the near-space environment. The data from Professor Crosby's experiment will be analyzed by Carthage physics students in the coming year.

The program is conducted in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia with support from NASA. The purpose of the workshop is to teach future scientists and engineers first-hand how to develop experiments for flight on sounding rockets. Faculty and students carried their new-found knowledge back to their home campuses where they can work on future experiments for flight on subsequent launches.

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