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Colorado Space Grant Consortium:
From Sounding Rockets to Satellites, Space Grant Projects Help Students Launch Successful Careers

Colorado Space Grant students Lee Jasper (at left) and Emily Walters hold a cannister developed for the RocketSat program, while alumnus Mike Grusin (at right) sits next to the HOMER rocket payload he helped to develop a decade ago.

A little over 10 years ago, the Colorado Space Grant Consortium launched its third sounding rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern shore of Virginia. The High-altitude Ozone Measuring and Educational Rocket, dubbed HOMER, was designed and constructed over a two-year period, and was successful in taking ozone measurements at the edge of space, using a suite of four science instruments.

The rocket's real legacy, however, was in helping to launch the careers of more than 100 students who worked on the project at universities throughout Colorado. COSGC alumni held a reunion last fall marking the 10th anniversary of HOMER's launch on Aug. 12, 1996.

Many of the students who worked on HOMER have gone on to successful careers, such as Jennifer (Owens) Rocca who recently worked on the Deep Impact mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As launch activity lead and flight director, she was responsible for orchestrating all spacecraft operations surrounding the January 2005 rocket launch, which sent the spacecraft on its trajectory to reach Comet Tempel 1.

"My experience with the Colorado Space Grant Consortium working on the HOMER mission was my first introduction to the engineering of space flight," Rocca says. "This hands-on experience is the key element of my education that truly prepared me to be a key player for launch of a groundbreaking NASA science mission. HOMER taught us about using teamwork to solve challenging engineering problems."

Although COSGC students haven't developed any additional rockets in the last decade, they are working on a series of payloads to be launched aboard commercially built rockets. A new program last year known as RocketSat offers students the opportunity to launch small, satellite-type payloads into sub-orbital space from the New Mexico Spaceport. The first flight in September 2006 was unsuccessful in reaching the mission altitude of 140 miles, but various follow-on flights are planned.

CU-Boulder students also are designing and building a one-kilogram, 10-centimeter, cube-shaped satellite known as CubeSat, which is scheduled to be launched into orbit by the end of 2008. CubeSat's mission is to test certain flight systems and enhance communications on future spaceflights.

These and other ongoing COSGC programs provide students with a variety of opportunities to gain real-world experience with space hardware. For many alumni, that has made all the difference.

For more information visit: http://spacegrant.colorado.edu