Zero Gravity Impact. RRCC Students Launch Into Space This Summer

Can a new home-made material protect precious data in an SD card as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere to come back to Earth? And can students control which test metals fuse in space?

Those are two questions ambitious students at Red Rocks Community College are looking to answer with a pair of experiments now approved to get sent up to space this summer.  

“It’s so cool that this is just a club I can be in for free as a student, and I can talk to people in NASA,” said Kate Shirley, an RRCC student and one of the project leaders. “It’s so cool that we as a community college get to put something in space to further human knowledge.”

The team competed against students from across the country for a spot on a rocket heading into space. And due to budget cuts, this year was even more competitive. Since space on the rocket is limited, “only the most developed and capable projects as well those who perform well during the initial design reviews will be selected,” NASA said.

The RockSat team is made up of 11 students from RRCC and from Arapahoe Community College. It is one of four Space Grant teams supported by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium at RRCC.

“They are a spectacularly strong team,” said Lynne Albert, one of the team’s advisors. “They’re doing an impressive job with communicating, and in really marketing their project to NASA. They’re learning so much.” 

Exploring different paths 

Kate is in her third year studying at RRCC. She is working on a physics degree and plans to transfer to CU Boulder to study astrophysics. One day she’d love to work in research with the Hubble Telescope.  

Working on the RockSAT team at RRCC, she says she’s learning a lot about project management and collaboration. She helps ensure students stay on track working together, meeting deadlines, and coordinating to ensure the necessary parts of the projects are moved between campuses depending on who is working on each part at the time. She’s helping the team pull research and think critically about meeting the criteria NASA has set forth. 

“We’re doing stuff that most of us have never done before,” Kate said. “It’s been phenomenal. 

Erik Eastman, a student at Arapahoe Community College who is also working on the RockSat project, is in his second year on the team, and was involved in the initial planning for the experiments.  

Erik said students looked at issues that have existed in the past. Data has been hard to collect from projects that do go up to space because it often gets destroyed on the re-entry. And another student had heard about issues that NASA has had in the past where cold welding has happened in space, but it’s an issue that hasn’t been researched much.  

“It’s exciting. We’re actually trying to do cold welding in space,” Erik said. 

Erik had a full-time career but wanted a change and started community college taking just one or two classes at a time. Mostly, he was thinking he wanted a career related to math. One of his advisors suggested he join the RockSat team as a way to get exposure to more fields. It worked. Now, he’s envisioning a career in engineering.  

“I’m learning a little bit about everything, CAD software, circuits, electronics, even coding,” Erik said. “It’s going fantastic.” 

The RRCC team’s projects are designed around several potential problems. The projects will be connected to the rocket’s power source initially but are timed so that when the power from the rocket is no longer available, the experiments can switch to battery power without skipping a beat. 

Then there’s a timer that has to be programmed correctly to let go of the various pieces of metal at the right moment to see if they will fuse together while in space. There are three combinations of metal pieces that are being tested, including a gold piece with gold piece that is expected to fuse, a gold with a thick oxidative layer of aluminum that will go through some rubbing to see if the protective oxidative layer is worn enough to fuse to the gold, and an aluminum with aluminum test.  

Students will examine the results after the rocket comes back to Earth. 

Kate is in her third year studying at RRCC. She is working on a physics degree and plans to transfer to CU Boulder to study astrophysics. One day she’d love to work in research with the Hubble Telescope.  

Working on the RockSAT team at RRCC, she says she’s learning a lot about project management and collaboration. She helps ensure students stay on track working together, meeting deadlines, and coordinating to ensure the necessary parts of the projects are moved between campuses depending on who is working on each part at the time. She’s helping the team pull research and think critically about meeting the criteria NASA has set forth. 

“We’re doing stuff that most of us have never done before,” Kate said. “It’s been phenomenal. 

Erik Eastman, a student at Arapahoe Community College who is also working on the RockSat project, is in his second year on the team, and was involved in the initial planning for the experiments.  

Erik said students looked at issues that have existed in the past. Data has been hard to collect from projects that do go up to space because it often gets destroyed on the re-entry. And another student had heard about issues that NASA has had in the past where cold welding has happened in space, but it’s an issue that hasn’t been researched much.  

“It’s exciting. We’re actually trying to do cold welding in space,” Erik said. 

Erik had a full-time career but wanted a change and started community college taking just one or two classes at a time. Mostly, he was thinking he wanted a career related to math. One of his advisors suggested he join the RockSat team as a way to get exposure to more fields. It worked. Now, he’s envisioning a career in engineering.  

“I’m learning a little bit about everything, CAD software, circuits, electronics, even coding,” Erik said. “It’s going fantastic.” 

The RRCC team’s projects are designed around several potential problems. The projects will be connected to the rocket’s power source initially but are timed so that when the power from the rocket is no longer available, the experiments can switch to battery power without skipping a beat. 

Then there’s a timer that has to be programmed correctly to let go of the various pieces of metal at the right moment to see if they will fuse together while in space. There are three combinations of metal pieces that are being tested, including a gold piece with gold piece that is expected to fuse, a gold with a thick oxidative layer of aluminum that will go through some rubbing to see if the protective oxidative layer is worn enough to fuse to the gold, and an aluminum with aluminum test.  

Students will examine the results after the rocket comes back to Earth. 

Kate is in her third year studying at RRCC. She is working on a physics degree and plans to transfer to CU Boulder to study astrophysics. One day she’d love to work in research with the Hubble Telescope.  

Working on the RockSAT team at RRCC, she says she’s learning a lot about project management and collaboration. She helps ensure students stay on track working together, meeting deadlines, and coordinating to ensure the necessary parts of the projects are moved between campuses depending on who is working on each part at the time. She’s helping the team pull research and think critically about meeting the criteria NASA has set forth.

“We’re doing stuff that most of us have never done before,” Kate said. “It’s been phenomenal.

Erik Eastman, a student at Arapahoe Community College who is also working on the RockSat project, is in his second year on the team, and was involved in the initial planning for the experiments.  

Erik said students looked at issues that have existed in the past. Data has been hard to collect from projects that do go up to space because it often gets destroyed on the re-entry. And another student had heard about issues that NASA has had in the past where cold welding has happened in space, but it’s an issue that hasn’t been researched much.  

“It’s exciting. We’re actually trying to do cold welding in space,” Erik said.

Erik had a full-time career but wanted a change and started community college taking just one or two classes at a time. Mostly, he was thinking he wanted a career related to math. One of his advisors suggested he join the RockSat team as a way to get exposure to more fields. It worked. Now, he’s envisioning a career in engineering.  

“I’m learning a little bit about everything, CAD software, circuits, electronics, even coding,” Erik said. “It’s going fantastic.”

The RRCC team’s projects are designed around several potential problems. The projects will be connected to the rocket’s power source initially but are timed so that when the power from the rocket is no longer available, the experiments can switch to battery power without skipping a beat.

Then there’s a timer that has to be programmed correctly to let go of the various pieces of metal at the right moment to see if they will fuse together while in space. There are three combinations of metal pieces that are being tested, including a gold piece with gold piece that is expected to fuse, a gold with a thick oxidative layer of aluminum that will go through some rubbing to see if the protective oxidative layer is worn enough to fuse to the gold, and an aluminum with aluminum test.  

Students will examine the results after the rocket comes back to Earth. 

Support Gets Students Launch-Ready

The RockSat project has a long history with the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. The RockSat project built by students from RRCC and ACC is one of just three from Colorado heading into space this year.

At Red Rocks, RockSat is one of four teams working on NASA Space Grant projects. All four projects will be highlighted this month when RRCC is scheduled to host the Colorado Space Grant Symposium on April 25th. Other schools receiving funding from the NASA Space Grant project will participate in the symposium, coming to share about their own projects and ready to learn about others’ work.  

At RRCC, the team is supported with money from the NASA space grant, but also with additional funding from the Red Rocks Community College Foundation. The team is also getting industry support from a company providing some of the materials.

The funding pays for students to have access to materials for their project designs but also will pay for students to travel to the Wallops Flight facility in Virginia. One group will travel in May for a week of final testing and if successful, mounting the project on the launch rocket. Then, the rest of the students will travel to watch the launch, June 25.

Kate and Erik will both travel with the first half of the team helping to get the project across the finish line.

“It’s really exciting if we can get cold welding to happen, but it’s also going to be good data if it doesn’t happen,” Kate said. “There’s a lot that’s unknow which is part of the reason we’re so excited.”