Seventh Year For The 'RockOn!' Program For College Students

Registration is open for NASA's seventh annual RockOn! workshop to be held June 14-19 at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, VA. This workshop, offered in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia, engages university and community college students and faculty interested in learning how to develop science payloads for spaceflight.

"This is the seventh year students will be coming to Wallops to learn the basics of developing a science payload for flight on a suborbital rocket," said Phil Eberspeaker, chief of the sounding rocket program office at Wallops. "Past students have gone on to careers in the aerospace industry, demonstrating the value of this program as a successful part of their career development."

During the workshop, participants work in teams to build experimental payloads to fly on a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket expected to fly to an altitude of 73 miles. The flight will take place the final day of the workshop, weather permitting.

"Through this program, we bring together university and community college students and instructors from across the United States and provide them an authentic payload development and spaceflight experience," said Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. "The workshop focuses on the fundamentals of building scientific experiments and the importance of working together as a cohesive team. These are the hallmarks of successful space projects."

Since 2008, 240 people have participated in the RockOn! workshops and successfully built and launched 79 payloads into space.

Registration closes May 2. Workshop participants must be U.S. citizens or have a valid, government-issued green card.

FMI: http://spacegrant.colorado.edu/rockon, www.nasa.gov/soundingrockets