Students launch sounding rocket in the Fly A Rocket! programme

The Fly a Rocket! programme combines theoretical course work carried out online with a hands-on launch campaign of a sounding rocket from the Andøya Space launch site in Northern Norway. The programme is realized in a partnership between the ESA Education Office, Andøya Space Education and the Norwegian Space Agency.

30 students representing 19 ESA Member States have been selected to participate in the online course of the programme, where they learned among others about rocket physics, flight dynamics, atmospheric physics, and fundamentals of rocket flight simulations.

After the online course was concluded, 24 students were invited to travel to Andøya Space, to participate in a real rocket launch campaign. Next to lectures and lessons from space professionals, most of the time during the campaign was dedicated to hands-on rocket work.

For this, the participating students were divided into three different working sections. The students in the “Sensor Experiments” section prepared most of the sensors that were placed inside the rocket. Students of the “Payload” section were responsible to integrate these sensors into the rocket and test their correct function. The third section, “Telemetry and Data Readout”, set up the Andøya Space Education telemetry station, making sure sensor data could be received during the flight.

The participating students were also responsible for the scientific work during the campaign. Unlike ordinary scientific rocket campaigns, the scientific goal of the student rocket was not set in advance and the students needed to coordinate among them to define scientific cases they wanted to investigate with the sensors available.

On 16 March 2023, it was finally time to launch. Students had the chance to actively take part in the countdown procedure. They could take over different ground stations during launch operations while being seated next to experts from Andøya Space guiding them through the process. After a countdown of about one hour, at 14:20 local time, the student rocket lifted off towards the sky. It reached an altitude of approximately 8 km before splashing down in the Norwegian Sea. Sensors on board of the rocket gathered valuable atmospheric data all along the flight, which was transmitted to ground.

The last day of the campaign was then dedicated for the analysis of the received data and a preliminary presentation of results. Following the launch campaign, the students will work together to prepare a final report of their findings.

Congratulations to all students and organisers!