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Announcement Archive
8 December 2007 - FYS Culminates with “ClassSat” Launch
17 first-year students from the “This is Rocket Science!” first-year seminar (FYS) gathered near the Penn State campus to launch “ClassSat”—an 11-foot tall rocket built by SSPL students. The freshmen were tasked with constructing a payload to protect eggs during the launch and landing on the rocket. The event was featured on Penn State Live. All the payloads survived!
6 December 2007 - New Rocket Boom System Passes PDR with Norway
The Penn State boom system is being developed by request of the Norwegian Andoya Rocket Range (ARR). This project centers around the redesign of the booms from the ESPRIT payload, which successfully deployed in flight on July 1, 2007. The new system will be adaptable to a variety of payloads in order to satisfy the goals of both the SSPL and ARR. The ARR release is here.
The boom system is being developed by SSPL under the Advanced Technology and Mission Development Program.
6 December 2007 - Flyin’ Lions to fly weightless with NASA again
For the second year in a row, the Flyin’ Lions team lead by Jessica Tramaglini was again selected for NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program. The students will experience a weightless environment along with their experiment on NASA’s C-9 aircraft from the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas. Their experiment focuses on a unique category of plasmas, called dusty plasmas. This is a relatively young field of research, with many opportunities for application including silicon wafer fabrication and even astrophysical phenomena including planetary rings.
30 November 2007 - Sophomore presents to National Space Grant Directors
Sophomore Allen Kummer travelled to Las Cruces, NM to share his experiences at the Jet Propulsion Lab with the directors of the National Space Grant Consortium. Allen was part of a team of nine students from across the country that spent the summer designing a mission concept for a student Mars payload called the Mars Student Climate Lander. Allen and the team worked with many science and engineering experts on Mars Exploration and concluded the summer with a briefing to JPL Director, Dr. Charles Elachi.
14 November 2007 - First-Year Students Present to NASA Astronaut
Several first-year students lead by Ben Pipenberg and Mike Wozniak presented their mission concepts for the annual National CanSat Competition to visiting NASA astronaut Captain Robert “Hoot” Gibson. The CanSat students will be designing and building a payload for the Competition in spring, 2008. The students will travel to Amarillo, Texas in June 2008 to compete against schools from across the country. Captain Gibson became an astronaut in 1979 and flew five space shuttle missions between 1984 and 1995. Gibson served as Chief of the Astronaut Office from 1992 to 1994 and as Deputy Director, Flight Crew Operations in 1996. Captain Gibson was visiting Penn State with the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.
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10 November 2007 - Students Mentor Young Women
The 10th WISE conference “Expanding Your Horizons in Science, Mathematics and Engineering” was a one-day career exploration opportunity for girls in grades 6–9 and their parents, teachers, and counselors. The main event for this conference was the hands-on projects represented from many science- related organizations. The 'Rocket Racer' was one project presented by Dhurata Stroni and other SEDS/ SSPL students. SEDS is the Education and Public Outreach program of SSPL.
17 August 2007 - NittanySat Students Present to Air Force at Small Sat
NittanySat students presented their Preliminary Design Review (PDR) to the University Nanosatellite Program (UNP) at the 21st Annual Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah. NittanySat is being developed by students at Penn State and will investigate D-region radiowave absorption and correlate the results with the local spacecraft environment and incident particle flux. The University Nanosatellite Program is sponsored by the US Air Force Research Lab. Grants were awarded on a competitive basis to 11 universities to build a small satellite in two years.
3 August 2007 - SSPL Launches the new site!
19 June 2007 - Students Witness Unveiling of new JPL Mars Yard and Rover
Students Allen Kummer and Brian Schratz witnessed the unveiling of the new "Mars Yard" and the mobility model of the new Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. MSL (concept shown below right) marks a new chapter in Mars Exploration and is scheduled to launch during the 2009 launch opportunity. The students appeared in a Planetary Society blog of the event.
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14-16 June 2007 - Students Launch High-Altitude Balloon 28 km High
David McLaughlin, Eric Ridings, Eric Odenthal, and Chris Schultz from the NittanySat project recently traveled to Colorado to build and launch a high altitude balloon as part of the Student Hands-On Training (SHOT) workshop sponsored by the US Air Force. The team was able to track the payload with GPS as it ascended to 92,000 feet. The payload contained a digital camera and sensors for solar energy intensity, temperature and pressure. The next day each team attached their payload to the high-altitude balloon. All of the students' payload circuits, switches, wires, and structures were soldered and assembled by the Penn State team. SHOT is part of the University NanoSatellite-5 program.
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8 June 2007 - First Penn State CanSat Launches from Texas
Students from the CanSat project travel to Amarillo, Texas to launch their payload. The team was comprised of all first-year students and a third-year project manager. The team built 500-gram payload structure and electronics that measured barometric pressure, communicated with a ground station in real time.
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3-7 June - Students Present their Work in Sweden at ESA Conference
Seven students and three professors attend the 18th European Space Agency Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon Programmes and Related Research in Visby Sweden. The participants presented their work on the ESPRIT sounding rocket project, NittanySat nanosatellite, and the formulation of SSPL.
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14 April 2007 - SSPL Prepares to Inspire the Next Generation
The SSPL-sponsored First Year Seminar This is Rocket Science was established for entering first-year students. The course will introduce students to college and engineering. Students will also get a crash- course in the skills it takes to be a "rocket scientist" by learning from professors and students experienced in building balloons, rockets, satellites, and space shuttle payloads! (listed as E E 010S, Section 3 on the schedule of courses or schedule number 881590 on e-lion).
20 March 2007 - Students Fly Weightless with NASA
Flyin' Lions students fly weightless on NASA's microgravity aircraft, the "vomit comet." Penn State Live summarizes the event and provides a link to the student's blog and pictures.
15 February 2007
ESPRIT students awarded best undergraduate paper in the College of Engineering Research Symposium. See the story on Penn State Live.
13 February 2007
The Space Systems Engineering Certificate has now been approved. Students may use SSPL projects to satisfy the project component of the certificate. Interested students should contact Dr. Sven Bilén.
31 January 2007
SSPL students will be traveling to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) in Virginia on February 16 to present the successes of the ESPRIT sounding rocket payload which launched in July 2006. The presentation will be followed by a tour of the WFF facilities.
18 January 2007
The Penn State Nanosat-5 team was selected to compete in the 5th University Nanosatellite Program. Penn State was one of a dozen universities that will design and build a complete nanosatellite system and compete for a launch into orbit on an Air Force or NASA rocket. For more information, refer to the Nanosat-5 web site.
14 December 2006
The Flyin' Lions Team was selected by NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program that they will be flying with their dusty plasma experiment aboard NASA's C-9 aircraft in a zero-gravity environment. For more information, refer to the Flyin' Lions web site.