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Students to launch rocket in Nevada in September

Goffstown Editor — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:25:00 GMT

Working with rockets is no easy business. But one group of students from Dunbarton has already become experts.

This club, made up of eight middle and high school students from Weare, Dunbarton, and Hill, will compete in the ARLISS project in September, a program that allows students to build and launch a scientific payload inside a rocket in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

Mark Kibler, a teacher at Weare Elementary School, is their adviser.

“We’re building the payload to go in the rocket,” said Kibler. “They gave us the specifications and we made one (a rocket) to test with.”

The payload consists of an atmospheric sampling probe, or ASP, that the students built, plus the pod that will contain it. The students have been working on the ASP for months, and the goal is for the ASP, after launch, to measure atmospheric conditions, including temperature, humidity and altitude.

“When it gets to the ground, you plug it (the ASP) into the computer and a graph will come up and give data results,” said Chris Kibler, Mark’s son and one of the students.

The students will be successful if everything comes back to the ground properly, they can recover the ASP safely and it gets valid results. They will launch with five other teams, including a team from Stanford University, colleges in Japan and a group in Montana.

The project starts Sept. 13. The team will most likely launch on Wednesday, Sept. 16. The event is not a competition, so there will be no winner, only a banquet at the end of the week to recognize and award plaques to all the teams.

“The launch window will be probably between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., just because there’s so much prep work,” said Chris. “I think Tuesday will probably be the calm before the storm. I foresee three to four hours of prep work.”

The students have been working on projects like this for years now, and three of them, Chris, Tyler Becker and Mollie Dowst, now seniors in high school, started when they were in eighth grade. Their first project was to launch a rocket with an egg in it and safely land the rocket without breaking the egg. Other rocket projects have taught them valuable rules about thrust, weight and other concepts in rocket building.

“The first time (we built a rocket) it didn’t go very far,” said Tyler. “It was too heavy for the motor.” “We want it straight and stable, like a dart,” said Mark.

ARLISS, which has worked with students for the last 10 years, sent the club specifications to build their own rocket to test with before going to Nevada. There, the students will have a rocket prepared and ready for them. They may have to adjust the ASP to fit the rocket though, and they face several other decisions before they leave.

“We haven’t decided what motor to put in yet,” said Mollie. The motor plus the rocket fuel will determine how high the rocket will fly, which the team estimates could be between 30,000 and 50,000 feet.

The team is also deciding on whether to add another sensor to the ASP, which would monitor carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere. Adding this sensor could mean they would have to reconfigure parts of the ASP.

The other members on the team include Tom Zervos, Sean Doherty, Jessica Chapman, Andrew Mahn and Anna McGuire.

Mark hopes that as some of his team goes off to college or into high school that they’ve learned as much as they can along the way.

“It’s never really been about the rocket,” he said. “The rocket was a vehicle for the learning.”