Senior engineering students from James Madison University are perfecting a rocket for a NASA competition this spring. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
JMU's board of visitors holds WMRA's operating license, and JMU sponsors our programs.
[lab sounds, chatting]
In a fabrication lab in JMU's engineering department, nine students cluster around a purple-and-gold rocket made to climb a mile into the air. Cameron Funk explains its design.
CAMERON FUNK: It's a solid fiberglass, it's about 10 feet long and it's six inches in diameter … It has a drogue chute used to slow it down as it reaches apogee, and allowing it to sort of fall straight downward for a ways while still slowing it down, and it has a main parachute that deploys at the last 700 feet before the ground.
They're one of 60 teams competing in Huntsville, Alabama this spring. Their rocket has to reach an altitude between 4,000 and 6,000 feet, come down, and carry a device that can communicate its landing position back to the team without using a GPS.
BRANDON CARROLL: Last weekend we just conducted our first full-scale flight test.
Brandon Carroll was one of the students who first pitched the project two years ago.
CARROLL: We actually built a two-thirds model of this rocket and flew that, and then presented that flight and the critical design review for the NASA panel, so they basically check off, everything looks good with your design, and then [you] go about building it.
Another part of the project is getting local kids involved, as Abby Maltese explained.
ABBY MALTESE: Teaching … mostly fourth graders, some third graders, about gravity and air resistance, and they each get to design a parachute that they test with their partner and see which one has the most air resistance.
Blast off is scheduled for April 23rd.
