Wallops Flight Facility
Lewis Research Center
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The University of Cincinnati Sounding Rocket Project began three years ago. Under the NASA Student Launch Project, NASA gives universities the opportunity to apply for use of launch facilities, surplus rocket motors, and a small grant to design and manufacture the payload section of the rockets. Universities are selected for this program based on a competitive bid process. The flight experiments are judged for originality, implications for science, and educational value. The University of Cincinnati and the University of Colorado were the only institutions to be awarded a grant.
A sounding rocket consists of solid rocket motor stages and a payload section which houses the experiments. The solid rocket motors are mostly surplus ballistic missile stages, although larger stages can be manufactured for launch. The sounding rocket gets its name from early study of the earth's upper atmosphere. Much like the early sea "sounding" done by sonar on ships and submarines, the rocket does "sounding" of the atmosphere with various instruments. As rocket technology advanced, it became possible to leave the atmosphere and study the weightless aspects of space flight. Sounding rockets are currently very important in the study of attitude control systems, dynamic analysis of weightless bodies, and flame propagation in space, while serving an important role in studying the upper atmosphere.
NASA currently has sounding rocket sites all over the world, although the most used are White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, and Wallops Flight Facility, in Virginia. We are scheduled for a launch date in Autumn 1997 from NASA WFF. The flight will be a short ballistic trajectory over the Atlantic Ocean with water recovery performed by the United States Coast Guard. The flight plan will provide approximately three minutes of weightless time and a total flight, from launch to splash-down, of 15 minutes. The maximum expected altitude will be 60 miles. In contrast, the altitude of the boundary between our atmosphere and outer space is about 20 miles, and Alan Shepard's 1961 flight reached 116 miles.
This launch, designated SRP-1, will be on a spin stabilized Nike (first stage) Orion (second stage) launch vehicle. Since this will be the first flight of the University of Cincinnati designed payload, the mission will be used to evaluate the vehicle to accurately determine constraints for future missions. An attitude control system experiment, or ACE, will be deployed and tested with a series of pointing maneuvers and stabilization routines. The ACE consists of mechanical rate gyros, which measure the velocities about each axis, a control board, to interpret the rate data, and nitrogen gas thrusters, which will respond to commands from the control board. The science experiment on this mission is a study of atmospheric turbulence. Small aluminum fibers, chaff, will be ejected from the rocket at different altitudes. Doppler radar at Wallops Flight Facility will track the chaff to find wind speed and direction in the upper atmosphere. This information will then be used to improve the attitude control systems on future flights. In addition to our experiments, data recorders for The University of Vermont and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory will fly in our nose cone.
This project is the culmination of three years of hard work
by students of The University of Cincinnati and several sponsor
companies who volunteered time, material, and expertise.
Attitude control, propulsion systems, structures, and
subcontracting of machining were handled by Aerospace
Engineering students. Design of cirutry, data acquisition
systems and sensor sub-systems were done by Electrical
Engineering students.