 Speaker series talk for the 17th, 18th academic year. Tonight we are privileged to have Bill DiRienzo here with us. He is of course Professor of Physics here on campus. Finished his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2014. Specialized is really in astrophysics. And it's going to be talking about the rocket tree program that he's been working on with several of our former students. And current students? Yes, also current ones. Well great. For the redo, Dr. DiRienzo. Well thank you all for coming. Oh yes, clap for me. Yes, thank you for coming. It's so great to see so many of my students coming here for extra credit and even some people I didn't bribe to come here. So thank you all for coming. So it's been probably three years since I did my last speaker series talk. I got roped into one I think my very first semester where I actually talk about my research. So as an astrophysicist my specialty is actually in studying massive star formation. So where big massive stars come from, how they form. My name is a lot of radio astronomy and infrared astronomy and study different nebulas around the Milky Way. I'm pretty much not going to talk about any of that today. Alright, so what I want to talk about instead is some of the rocket tree programs that we've had going on here at Sheboygan that I've done with some students. There's really two and a half sort of different projects that have been going on over the past year-ish or so that we're going to try and keep going on here at campus. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about what we actually do with these. So feel free to tell any of your friends about these opportunities that we have. So I just titled it Simply Enough Rocket Tree. So up here is a picture of me with some of the students that worked on one of the rocket programs this past year. Their names and many of the other names who had anything to do whatsoever with the projects are pretty much all down here, along with a couple of our other staff that work here or worked here, Guy Campbell and Stephanie Evanson. And on the left-hand side there is a completed payload for sort of our crown jewel, rock-sat-sea rocket payload that I'll be talking about as well. And I'll tell you about some of these things I have out on the table as we go along here. But the first thing I want to actually talk about is the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium. So who here has ever actually heard of this? Great, quite a few of you, okay? So just filling you in in case you haven't or in case you have some incomplete or incorrect information if you have heard of it. NASA disperses most of its education and outreach funds through space grant consortia. There are 52 of them, so every state, D.C. and Puerto Rico each has one. And the consortium members are largely universities and colleges plus some industry partners and some other non-for-profit partners as well. So Wisconsin actually being sort of a middling state in terms of population actually has a huge consortium with a relatively large number of members. I think I heard at one point we had the second-most members of any state consortium, which is crazy. And we have a lot of very active programs. I remember I once was looking up Maryland Space Grant Consortium programs for somebody who was from Maryland and I was telling them, oh, you know, Space Grant Consortium has so many programs and I think I saw two things on their website. So we're in a pretty active one with a lot of different programs. I'm going to tell you about a couple of them. But basically what this means is that as a consortium member that we are, UW-Shabuigan, all of our students are able to apply for their various scholarships and fellowships and can take part in a lot of their different programs where they fund different activities like some of the rocket programs I'm going to talk about. It also means that our faculty and staff are able to apply for money for research funds or outreach or education funds. And so I keep trying to push these things on people so I'm not the only one applying for things all the time. But it's a pretty good way to get sort of small to maybe medium-ish size grants to support projects and try things out. So I took this screenshot of their website from a little while ago where the big news item still up there was the rocket winners from last year being announced, the Collegiate Rocket Launch. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about where our team fell and the results for that. But if anybody would like to know more about these programs, I always post a bunch of stuff on the bulletin board outside the wombat room here, and I've actually got a big pile of things I'll be updating for the new school year. Feel free to take my business cards on the way out if you have any questions about this or anything else that I talk about as well. And I want to especially push all of you students to think about trying to apply for something, one of their scholarships or something else this year, because it's really not as competitive as you think. And when they say that you have to be working in space science or supporting NASA's mission in some way to be eligible to apply, that can be very, very, very broad. We've had a lot of biologists and chemists apply for things because they can find a way to relate it back to human space flight. So just about anybody can get involved. So with that being said, one of the big programs that Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium does is this Collegiate Rocket Launch. So this is our team of four students from last year. So we have Ian, Chelsea, Robert, and Martha. Some of you might recognize them if you were here before. Ian is the one who is basically spearheading our initiative in the Collegiate Rocket Launch this year going forward. They already have their first big organizational meeting today, a whole three weeks before Space Grant Consortium has their first meeting. So we're actually ahead of the schedule for once on something. And so basically what this Collegiate Rocket Launch program is, is that every school in the consortium that can field the team, and this year I think we even had some schools that fielded two teams because they had enough student interest. They put together teams of four to six students and over the course of the year, so roughly from October to April, build a rocket, a model rocket, but not like a tiny little one like you would build from a kit at a hobby shop, but sort of a semi-custom made rocket about yay big. So this is the one that they actually ended up flying seen in that picture right up there. So this thing is five, six feet tall, and there's a lot of different freedoms that they have in their actual design. When you do this kind of rocket, there are a lot of sort of prefab parts like standard tube sizes, but you get to pick which one of those you use and what engine you use and things like that. And this competition has a whole bunch of different parts to it. The main part of course being the launch, and I said this was not just your standard little kit, the target altitude for these launches is 3,000 feet. So that's over half a mile up. So this is not a tiny little rocket that you can just fire off in the backyard. That is actually one of the first steps of the competition is to launch a tiny little rocket and take pictures of it so that they know you can do at least that much. So at some point here in the fall, you're going to be seeing this year's rocket team launch one or more rockets probably on the ground somewhere. Last year we just did it kind of over on the soccer fields and luckily it went over the P.E. building and didn't land on the roof. We're getting a whole bunch to test out some things for their bigger rocket. So I think we're going to announce at some point like a big rocket launch day that everybody can come and see what they're going to do. Last I heard the plan was to do 24 little ones. So we'll see if that turns out or not. That should be pretty fun. So anyway, the big part of the competition is trying to hit that target altitude. So you lose points not only if you're too low but if you go too high. So it's not just how high can you get sort of competition. There's a lot of places to it too. So for example, the team had to write a preliminary report and a final design report. They had to do an outreach component. So I took them to Usberg High School and we talked to some of the physics classes there about some of these programs. And they have to do a presentation the night before the launch as well where they talk about a lot of their design choices. In addition to all of that, every year there is a different challenge that goes along with the competition. So last year's challenge was to measure the intensity during rocket flight. So you had to generate it so you couldn't just have a battery and let it go. And it couldn't be something that was just running continuously from before launch. It had to be something that in some way turned on during launch. And then you measure either a voltage or a current. There were pretty lacks about how you actually measured it. Didn't have to actually power anything. You just had to get a measurement of something. So this is what the team decided to go with last year. What I think is a pretty simple, elegant design. It's basically this thing. It used for what are called peltier plates. Has anybody ever heard of those before? So a peltier plate is one of these white things that you see here along the edge. Okay. And basically if you apply a temperature difference, so it's hotter on one side than the other, it generates a little bit of voltage. Okay. And so what they did is that they machined out this aluminum block that goes in this fin section so that the actual motor of the rocket, which is basically a big firework, sticks up through the hole. The end of it sticks up through here. This is the cap that kind of screws it all in place. So when the motor goes off and it gets hotter on the inside than the outside, helped out a little bit by these shaved down heat sinks to try and keep it cooler on the outside as much as possible. So that was a little bit of voltage. And stacking them up in series, they got measurements, I think, peaking at around half a volts, typically more sustained around a few millivolts or so. And so that was enough for the competition. All right. So I'm actually, I'll pass this around if you guys want to take a look at it. At this point, I'm going to pass around most of these things. There's a lot of scary looking wires. It's harder to break than you think, and pretty much all these things are becoming museum pieces except you might scrounge the model rocket for parts at some point. There's nothing super expensive in terms of parts on any of these, so don't feel bad if you do break something off. Just let me know. Okay. What do you guys think some of the other teams did? Anybody have any ideas? What would you do if you were trying to generate electricity on a rocket? Did I hear mumble somewhere? I have no idea. Okay. Well, you're a historian, so I wouldn't expect you to know. I'm kidding. All right. Historically, how do people generate power? I know there are at least a couple students in this business class who are thinking about doing something in the STEM field, so I hope you guys have some idea. Somebody give me at least one other idea. Some kind of wind power. Yeah. I would say a good number of the teams tried to do some kind of wind power. Okay. I think there was one other team that did something like this, and a handful of teams out of the 13, I think it was in the total competition, that did some form of wind. So a couple of them tried to attach something just onto the side here. A little lateral sort of spinning thing to generate some electricity. Okay. And of course, the issue potentially with that is that you have some extra drag because you have this thing sticking off of the rocket, and potential weight issues because it's a little imbalanced. So what did some of the other teams who wanted to do a turbine did? They basically machined little air intakes around their tube and put their fan in the body of their tube to make it work. That's what they got away from. So the first one they didn't want to worry about the drag or balance issues. The second one, super worried that the rocket would tear itself apart during launch. Okay. I went to the launch last year in April. We had two rockets basically disintegrate during launch. One of them, the motor, just ripped apart the rocket, went through and still went straight up. The other one went to the side, spiraling towards a bunch of people and the rocket engine was still firing when it hit the picnic table. So this is, again, not just little backyard model rockets, right? There is actual safety concerns. Everyone has to stop and look at the rocket when it launches and you have to keep watching it until the parachute comes out to be safe. This past year in this April, we didn't have any rockets fall apart during launch, but what we did have is two of them where the parachutes didn't come out and so they came down pointing metal nose first way into the ground. I mentioned part of a successful launch and getting the points for it is recovering the rocket in a flyable condition. Those teams did not get any points for the launch day. Okay. So designing a structurally sound rocket is a big issue. So we got away from that. I'm surprised none of those turbine rockets fell apart or toppled over. Good for them. There was one group that had to basically just put a solar panel on the side of their rocket. I believe okay. And so we've already started talking about what this year's challenge is going to be and since we haven't had our first space grant consortium meeting about it yet it's a little unclear. It has something to do with taking a panoramic photo set at some point in launch. So we have to get some more details on that but probably going to involve something like a GoPro camera attached to the parachute at some point. Okay. So I'll just share a couple of the electronics so when you launch a rocket like this you can maybe kind of tell from the way it's broken up already it's basically built into stages and so once it goes up and it launches and it goes over Apogee there are a couple of little gun powder charges actually inside the rocket and they go off and the pressure pushes these little segments apart. They're held together by little one-time use plastic screws that get torn apart by the gun powder charge and so that pops out your parachute and so generally for a lot of these rockets they have two stages they have a smaller parachute that comes out first and then the full one comes coming out later the reason you do that is because you want a big one to make sure it lands softly but if you put that off right at the very top of the trajectory then it's going to take a very long time to come down and the wind is going to carry this thing far away. The actual competition launch is done in Abang Recreation Area in Kenosha and so they have a little rocket pad but all the area around it is basically sort of swampy reedy stuff with some trees and so you don't want it going super far where you have to wade through all this mud and grass and worry about ticks only to find out it got stuck in a tree where you can't reach it. So you put in this little one first because if you just wait for it to start coming down a while before the big one comes up that can actually rip apart the rocket as well because of the extra tension in the cord trying to stop a rocket that's already falling quickly so you just try to slow it with a little one called a drogue and then put up the main one later when it's lower. But to control all of this and to record your data for your altitude and to record your data for the challenge, the voltage measurements and all that there's basically a little bit of electronics that goes inside of this thing. So I'll pass this guy around again so this is something called a sled this basically just slides into one of the middle sections of the rocket here and what it's powered by is basically an Arduino UNO so it's just a little microcontroller in here that you can program from your laptop you sort of upload the programming here and then it's able to perform some simple tasks and this thing has what's called a shield it's an extra bore that plugs in on top of it where you can plug in an SD card so it records all of your data. So that's the crux of it. These three little things over here are the voltage sensors that they used for their competition and down here is the altimeter this actually measures the altitude. So you're recording the data for the altitude and the voltage over time this is also what's controlling the charges and telling the gunpowder charges when they go off basically by tracking the altitude and doing the timing. You can pass that around take a look at that and underneath there's a little 9 volt battery that is the power for this thing. So in doing this there's a couple different pieces you have to do your CAD style design of your rocket before you build it there's simulation software where you basically put in your design and try to estimate how high it's going to go and how stable it is so you want to try and build a stable rocket that's going to go your target altitude of 3,000 feet. If anything you probably want to design something that can go a little higher than that and know where your wiggle room is in terms of reducing weight or adding weight or things like that as needed after you actually do a test launch and see how far off the software was usually it's not bad but it's not exact plus you have to do some electronics you have to do the wiring up here and the computer programming with regard to the Arduino and of course then there's the actual building of the rocket itself, machining parts, painting it and things like that. So there's a lot of different jobs that go into this a lot of different ways that students can get involved Alright so talking a little bit about launch day so this thing over here on the left this was the tiny little rocket that they launched off last October it was about yay big they still have it though one of the fins is kind of flowing off those kit rockets are not very stable not very good but this is what you actually have to do on launch day is basically load up all the parts, fold in your parachute make sure you think it's actually going to come out when it's supposed to they actually are allowed to do as many launches as they want and can fit in during launch day and the best one is used so our team actually did two launches and the second one the main parachute actually did not come out it was packed tight enough and so it's kind of stuck in the tube luckily the drogue slowed it down enough and it landed on some soft grass and there was no damage but when I let you guys look at this later you can kind of see there's still a bunch of like scuff marks and things from when it landed but it actually takes a while like an hour or more to actually prep the rocket on rocket day even though it's done and get ready to go but it's pretty fun because you have these 13 teams everybody launches at least once many will launch twice but on the same day there's also something called the First Nations launch so Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium puts on this collegiate rocket launch for our members but they also put on a national program which is a very similar sort of launch but it's a separate competition just happening on the same day where their target audience is Native American groups so like tribal colleges and that so in Wisconsin we actually have one College of Menominee Nation up in the northern part of the state it's part of the Space Grant Consortium and some of the people around the country are invited to participate as well so there are dozens and dozens of rocket launches on this day so it's pretty spectacular to go see so if anybody doesn't want to go and be a part of our rocket team but would like to go see the launch you can go see that I can give you the date sometime in April as well and so with that let me actually show you a video of their launch at least up to the point where I stopped recording because I wasn't looking through my phone so you see there's a bunch of little rails out there so they actually do put them on railings there it goes and at some point you start to lose it because it goes high enough so there's worked, it actually went up both times, came down, was recoverable and all throughout the day they start marking off the different team results on this big chart did you have a successful flight, what was your altitude things like that I actually thought we were going to do really, really well compared to the year before where we had a team that was, it was nominally Sheboygan's team but it was really all Marathon County students because Marathon County was now part of the consortium and sort of borrowed our name since we didn't have a team they actually got fifth place even though both of their flights that they did a year ago were not high enough because you'd be surprised how many of these intrepid college students just don't do the outreach portion or do a terrible presentation and lose points on that so when we had a pretty decent launch this year and we thought we did a good job in the presentation and the reports and all that thought we were going to do very well turns out about half the teams had really good launches so of that target altitude 3000 feet we had, I think it was like 2700 or 2800 something feet like that and that sounds pretty good ultimately the winner was Fox Valley and they were less than 100 feet off from the target so our team ended up placing fifth but it was pretty tight at the top and ultimately it mostly came down to just feet difference in your actual altitude which is kind of annoying when you think about what the uncertainty and the altimeter might actually be you might actually be with an error of having one but it is what it is we're going to win this year but we're glad though that all three of the UW colleges campuses that are in the consortium so that's us, Fox Valley and Washington County all three had teams last year and we placed one three and five so that turned out pretty well for us and the big one is always Plattville the big engineering school they've won most years in recent memory and so they only came in second and I know they were really upset about that so we're glad that at least Fox Valley beat them which is good but again we'll be number one this year so that's most of what I wanted to say about the collegiate rocket launch portion before I start getting into the really big rockets so I don't think I'll pass these pieces around because they're pretty big but please feel free to come up and look at them and pick them up afterwards as well anybody have any questions on the collegiate rocket launch stuff before I move on? Yeah, Mark? What are the other schools that are in? Are they all UW schools? Largely, so in the consortium so it's just the three two-year campuses all of the four-year UWs except for I think Stout and Eau Claire are part of the consortium and I think generally about half of them are so field teams for this Marquette is a member and I think they had a team MSOE is a member they always have a team for this a couple other private schools Alverno and I think I want to say St. Norbert I think just left the consortium a couple other smaller ones Western Technical College I think is the only technical school in our consortium So what do we have to do to belong to it? Basically you need somebody like me who is willing to be the institutional wrap and go to the meetings twice a year we pay of order $100 membership fee every year and basically what that does is it goes towards the National Space Grant Consortium hires a lobbyist to go to Congress to ask for funds but we're not allowed to use the federal funds to do that directly so basically any school that's a member should be paying membership fees we all aggregate it and hire one lobbyist for the year although it's not as much just arguing for the funds as it is arguing that the funds should stay part of the Space Grant Consortium Program and not go to other NASA outreach offices which is kind of weird it seems like a waste of money but it's something that if we didn't do we wouldn't have the consortium really well funded but basically that and then we also have to do what's called a match so in all of these programs we provide a match so that it's not just NASA doling out money but we're also seeming invested so as far as Sheboygan is concerned our match is largely the amount of time I put in using my average hourly salary and then if we actually get a little bit that we actually put in for club funds for the Rockets and things like that what's the average printing cost of what I spend on flyers and stuff like that so it's actually not terribly onerous to remember other than you need to have at least one person who cares to do this stuff so yeah sure any other questions okay so let's talk about the really big Rockets then so this is the other one and a half or so project that we have alright so Collegiate Rocket Launch is pretty neat and that's something that we can pretty easily do every year as long as we have students who are interested okay and it's not terribly onerous in terms of time you know it's some hours per week but not awful there's a few students together and you can do it Space Grant actually does provide something like $750 worth of parts and building plus provides for the travel for the students to the actual launch day so usually that's not enough to build a rocket unless you're very lean and you only do one test launch and stuff like that but it's not too hard to get enough club funds from our SGA to help supplement that a little bit to be able to do an extra launch and try some things out this other program is a little bit bigger a little bit more time investment and a lot more money investment but there's also I think way cooler sorry for Collegiate Rocket Launch but this is the way cooler project so these other projects it's one and a half it's called rock on and rock sat rock sat C specifically is what we did and so this one is an honest to God rocket into space project so Collegiate Rocket Launch they design and build their own rocket have a simple payload that goes up on rock sat C it's all about designing and building the payload we leave the actual rocket construction and launch to the contractors that work with NASA right the real rocket scientists but we do get to put something into space as part of the program so we launch these rockets from wallops island or wallops flight facility it's in Virginia so NASA has a whole bunch of bases all over the country right Kennedy Space Center sort of the big launch facility that people know right down in Florida Cape Canaveral the really big lockets rockets launch okay wallops island is a smaller facility and it's a little bit more sort of I don't want to say risky but sort of research trial and error sort of launches a little bit smaller scale sort of trying out technologies and doing things that have a little bit more of a scientific research focus than maybe a put things in orbit or put humans in orbit type of focus okay so there's there was originally sort of a navy base and there is still a navy presence there when we went last June they it was actually the same time as a air show that was in Ocean City Maryland kind of up somewhere about here okay so we got to see the I think it's called the thunder cat not the thunder cats was it the thunderbirds right and then this year the same air show was when we were up there and we got to see the blue angels they were basically staying at the base and took off from there so it's pretty neat and so there's also some other navy research things that go on there they actually have some like radar ship mock-ups and things that they do for research there and some other projects as well but really the crux of what they do at wallops is what's called sounding rockets and sounding in this case basically just means taking a measurement so for example thinking about astronomy I said I do a lot of radio and infrared astronomy infrared waves don't go through the atmosphere all that well alright so in general to do infrared astronomy you need to get above at least part of the atmosphere if not all of it to actually take an infrared picture of a nebula and a lot of the wavelengths we might care to study it okay so ultimately what do we want we want a space probe we want a satellite an orbiting telescope alright so we've had those now in more modern times so things like the spitzer space telescope or the Herschel space telescope or the modern instruments and those are things that I've actually used for data for my own work the thinking back historically before we had those space probes are in satellites are really expensive okay so that's not the first thing you do the first thing you do is put your infrared camera on something like a weather balloon that goes up into the stratosphere for hours maybe days at a time and try and take pictures from there you're not above the whole atmosphere for infrared astronomy specifically you're above a lot of the water vapor so it lets you do science that you can't do from the ground because you're above a lot of the atmosphere and it's a relatively cheaper and easier way to test out technologies and sort of see what do I actually need to put in my infrared detector or my camera so you sort of start with that process and then maybe you build up to doing sounding rockets so now I want to go higher than the balloons but I'm not ready to invest in putting something in orbit yet so I'll do a sounding rocket something that will go up in our case the sounding rockets go up 70-something miles there are some bigger ones that go over 100 miles up suborbital you launch nearly straight up just a little bit to the east so when they come down they go in the ocean and not on top of people and then you just send out a recovery team to get the rocket payload so historically that's what sounding rockets were used for it's sort of building up to putting things on space probes and now even though we have things that we put up in satellites that orbit the earth we still want to try and test new technologies and so there's still often use for that not only do people use these kinds of devices for looking out to space but looking back down so if you think about like whether satellites or satellites that track vegetation or animal movement and things like that those are also things where you probably want a satellite but sometimes a balloon or a rocket might do or that might be a good way to sort of test something you would put on a satellite so at Wallops Flight Facility they actually still have a really active balloon program and when I say balloon I mean when it's fully inflated it's the size of a football field this is not a tiny balloon this is a big balloon carrying like a semi truck worth of payload equipment on it these are big things and in fact I don't have a picture of a launch here but when they launch them it looks like it's under inflated that's because it goes so high up that it goes to a lower pressure port of the atmosphere so you only have to put in a little bit of helium relatively down here and then by the time it's at the top of where it's going to go it's expanded out to the size of a football field so I haven't been to a balloon launch but I've seen the pictures and they look pretty stunning I kind of want to go to one I have been to the rocket launches though that's probably cooler anyway and the other things that they have at Wallops they also have some things that go on airplanes so sometimes just going up on an airplane is high enough as well in fact it's not run out of Wallops but there is an infrared observatory called SOFIA on this plane that just flies across the Pacific and they basically break it up to make sure the telescope is always pointing at the same part in the sky even as it jostles around so there's a lot of science that you can do if you can get above at least part of the atmosphere and so Wallops does a lot of these pieces so Wallops is located here on this peninsula of Virginia that hangs off of Maryland it's basically a pretty rural area despite being on the east coast there's not a whole lot going on in that peninsula and then there's this Chincoteague island over here which is kind of a resort town so that's sort of what's on the area so the main base is actually up here so it is controlled under security so when we go with our team we stay at the dorms on the base and when I say dorms I mean single occupancy hotel rooms and because we are staying on the base we get security badges so we get to go past security like the general public cannot do and so we are actually staying like 100 feet away from the airfield and there's no actual other wall between us and the airfield so it's a pretty neat experience to be able to go to this base so that's the main base where they do a lot of the actual work and planning for things and that's where Mission Control is and then down here is the Wallops island area that's where they actually have the navy radar mock-ups and the launch pads for their sounding rockets I will also mention that the biggest rockets that they launch out of Wallops are called the Antares rockets and these are the unmanned resupply missions to the International Space Station so that's sort of the big thing that they do at Wallops but mostly it's sort of smaller to medium scale rocket launches so here's a couple pictures from around the area well I should mention up here you see the basketball court has the nice NASA logo on it they have NASA logos on everything which is really neat I don't think you can kind of tell but there is that water tower up there near the top that also has NASA logos on it so you walk around the base and generally if you don't step on the airfield security doesn't tackle you or anything you can kind of peek around and see what's going on so they do have a range control center building and they did not let us go into the room but they let us go into the room above the room and look down into it this is basically Mission Control so for an Antares rocket every single one of these stations would be full up kind of like Apollo 13 something like that not quite a full staff for our sounding rockets I don't think but still quite a few people watching you know making sure that the they're tracking where the rocket is so when the fisherman goes out to get it they have some idea and they're not just zooming around the ocean all day they also have to track the trajectory because if it goes too far off the trajectory and might come back on the land they have to blow it up before it goes any further alright so speaking of sounding rockets with infrared telescopes on it my thesis advisor at Virginia started doing infrared instrumentation before he focused on just the astronomy part he was at University of Colorado I think for his grad school work and he was he designed and built an instrument for a rocket that was launched at White Sands in New Mexico so they're not launching over the ocean they're launching over very large desert of a lot of white sand that is generally uninhabited and his first launch they had to blow it up because it was going too far off the trajectory and they were afraid it was going to go to like Albuquerque or something like that instead of instrumentation and get to something that was less likely to blow up alright so this is the kind of thing that they have to check the safety for that luckily our rocket launches went on without a hitch which is good this is a picture of one of their planes that they have that they can upload a lot of scientific equipment on and just kind of fly over areas and track the vegetation or animal life things like that they also have some other planes and helicopters that they use not only for their scientific missions but when they're doing a launch they have to clear the area so both the water has to be cleared of boats and the land around there has to be cleared of people there are a lot of people with duck blinds and otherwise out hunting that they want to get out of the area and a lot of the economy in the town is based on fishermen so there are a lot of fishermen that want to get out for the day and go fish and there is the Coast Guard that sort of tracks the area they actually don't have as much authority as you would think to totally stop a boat and say hey we're going to launch you wait here basically they say it's not a good idea if you go but if somebody goes you have to wait for them to get out of the area and so I don't think we've ever had an issue with this but I know for some of their launches they spend a while convincing a person to get out of their duck blind for at least an hour or two and then come back so they can launch a rocket over here on the right hand side so this is a picture of Rock On the workshop last year in June so this is me on the right hand side in the middle is Ryan Kosolik who is a student here he's just started at UW-Milwaukee this fall a biology student but he's been here for a while at Cheboygan he was SGA president last year and then this on the left hand side that's Christine Thompson she is the assistant director of Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium so basically the way that this Rock On thing came about and the way we got involved in these larger rocket projects is that when I started three years ago Christine was also starting her job and so she was going around to the different affiliate members and sort of talking about them talking to them about what they do and sort of what their needs are and so I was pretty new here and so I didn't know a whole lot about what kind of projects we had in the past or what things were going to turn out to be like but I knew a little bit already from talking to people sort of what our demographics and our student population was like so when she asked me what I needed and what I thought we would be able to do as a consortium member I told her look I have a lot of students who are freshman, sophomore status and a lot of them have jobs and other things outside of class I want to look for ways to try and engage people in doing some kind of research in astronomy or physics or something related to that but I need things that are accessible at the freshman sophomore level and things that students can do even if they can't put in tons of time or at least maybe things where we can give them some good monetary incentive so that it's worth them taking out time to be able to do these things so she listened to me and so she's actually made a couple really good changes in the consortium that are friendly to all the two year campuses so example undergraduate scholarship generally you can apply for that in spring to have money for next year a lot of students that are interested in STEM I find out about them when they take my physics class and that's usually the last year that they're here so they're going somewhere else so she was able to put aside one of the scholarships for someone in a two year school to apply for in fall to have the scholarship in spring so this is my first little bit of advertising for the year somewhere around it's the end of September or beginning of October is the deadline for that so any of you who are going to be here or even at one of the other space grant consortium institutions in spring you can apply for that one position which usually doesn't get a ton of applicants and maybe get a scholarship for spring and even if you don't get that one you go back in the general pool with everybody else and apply for the scholarships for the next year so the way this came about is that she called me up I think it was last year in February or so and said hey there's this really cool program called rock on Colorado space grant consortium puts it on it's in Virginia so this is kind of like another one of these national programs that a state consortium puts on kind of like the first nations launch that we do and she said are some of our schools from Wisconsin have done this in the past it's really great basically you build a rocket payload you can take some students you get experience actually putting something in space and we also have this generic program in Wisconsin space grant consortium called a NASA competitions fund and you can apply for up to 3,000 bucks per school for any other NASA program that's not covered under our other programs and if you apply for it you're going to get it and you're going to get all the money and I think it was like 4,000 bucks so we were like yeah we'll do that and we cobbled together a little from the department and from the campus to pay for this and then space grant paid for Christine to go as a staff member of theirs and so we went and we were a team of three and we did this rock on program and what rock on is is that you build a payload like this from a kit so you walk in there if you don't already have a team of three so teams and they give you a box full of parts and then over the next several days you put together all the parts solder them in, make the electrical connections do a bunch of tests put in the programming test the programming and all this sort of stuff and then eventually you end up with this payload that goes on the rocket that goes into space so rock on is just about a week don't have to design anything but you get to actually build and test your own payload and you get to bring it back and say this went into space alright so I'll tell you a little bit about this and I'll start passing it around but this again is something controlled by an Arduino so it's an Arduino mega instead of an Arduino Uno so it's a little bit bigger but still generally just a microcontroller and so just for reference these microcontrollers, these arduinos and raspberry pies have roughly the kind of computing power that like a home PC would have in the early to mid 90's compressed down into this little guy I think they're a little bit easier to use in program though but basically what they have here is that our Arduino mega is sort of powering the whole thing controlling all of it but then there's this board up here that we solder together all these different resistors and capacitors and different components and some relays solder on some sensors so we have accelerometers in three dimensions we have gyroscopes in three dimensions temperature and pressure sensor inside the rocket a little SD card here to record data and then over on here this other board is what's called a geiger counter it basically detects radiation so you have this little tube full of fairly inert gas and you apply a high voltage across it like a couple hundred volts and it's really not electrically conductive except that when a radiation particle, use that sort of general term comes in, it can ionize the gas and so you get like a little jump and a little drop in the little digital spike and current that registers as a count so you're basically counting how many radioactive particles come into the tube by looking for those little drops and this really sophisticated piece of equipment that actually went into space is powered by two 9 volt batteries from Energizer so you think things that go into space have to be really complicated and really expensive, they don't necessarily if you're not putting something on the space station certainly the other little thing that I'll mention two of them there real quick so there's this little plastic box so everybody got a memento box so I got to send up a little keychain from the bookstore here that was in space the other thing that goes along with this is that you want to be able to turn this thing on when the launch starts so that you don't drain your 9 volt battery from the time you load it into the rocket until it goes off so part of that is that there's this violet cable that runs in that they sort of turn on when you go but the actual way that it turns on your payload there's this little thing called the G-switch here that you can play with it's basically just a little bit of hardware on sort of a spring so that when the launch goes up that depresses and that turns your thing on so once you've gotten the violet signal and that goes, you're on and then it runs until we take it apart when we get it back so I'll let you pass that around so this is what we did last year in June so June 2016 each of the 20 or so teams built basically an identical version of that and what went up in the rocket was roughly half rock-on payloads and then about half of what we call the Roxat C payloads okay so let me just show you these are a couple of the components the major components so the Geiger board there's also a Z accelerometer sort of accelerometer in the launch direction and the shield board with the Arduino there okay and so this is sort of what it looks like when you put it all together so that plastic piece that it's all mounted on that part was actually not flown in space for most of the teams they assembled one that looked like that and so they actually have their plate go into space what they actually do is stack a bunch of them into one of these canisters and so that canister holds I think something like eight or nine of these and then the canisters go in the rocket okay to save space we were one of the few actually put our payload directly on the lid of the canister that did not let us take the lid home so when we got it back we had to transfer everything back over to that plastic piece okay but otherwise everything else went up into space so this is what it looks like when you start assembling it and our general workstation over here it's actually pretty nice they give every team a big table you get an electrostatic discharge mat where you get to plug in so you don't shock and sort out anything you get your soldering iron different tools your magnifying glass and stuff like that so it's a pretty big operation especially since considering they're based out of Colorado so the guy that runs this thing Chris Kohler from Colorado he organizes this with his students in Colorado packs up everything and ships it out to Virginia and then they unpack it every year and ship all their stuff back so he's been doing it for about a decade so they've really practiced this and gotten it to work pretty smoothly now okay all right so that's the rock-on project and so it's sort of a baby step into these other projects that they have called RockSat so there's RockSat C and then RockSat X and basically both of those are spending the school year with the team actually designing your own payload instead of just building one from a kit and doing whatever experiment you want to do and putting that up on the rocket okay so these are a couple examples of some different RockSat payloads on the left here is one from RockSat C so that's what we did this past year so this is roughly the other half of the same sounding rocket that RockOn goes up on okay but you're not necessarily bound to putting it on that tiny thin little thing you can basically either buy a canister or half a canister we did half a canister okay and then on the right-hand side here is an example of RockSat X so RockSat X is another step up in complexity and cost and that's on a bigger rocket and that one actually goes up higher I want to say 80 or 90 something miles okay and that one they also have the skin come off so you can do things where you actually have to expose to space. RockSat you do have some options to have little ports if you want to expose a little sensor or do some atmosphere samples things like that RockSat X they just have the whole panels of the rocket come off so you can do whatever exposure to space in the high altitude you want to do it also means that the payload you build has to be able to withstand reentry now it's not like an Apollo reentry so it's not awful but if you see the videos that they've taken of it does kind of fire up a little bit it does get warm and of course it also splashes back down in the ocean so it has to be waterproof so I don't know if we're ever going to get up to the stage of doing RockSat X we've talked about it if we as a school continue doing RockSat C or ever move up to RockSat X it would probably be something where we would do as a collaboration with one of the four-year schools that has a little bit more students resources and the expertise for doing something like that so it's possible we move up there okay but what our team wanted to do was primarily something where we put DNA into space and just saw what the damage was so I mentioned that Ryan was a biology student he was really super excited after rock on wanted to do a RockSat project right away and he was really inspired by this team from University of Puerto Rico that has a RockSat X project they've basically been doing the program since the beginning and just refining their experiment every year and they do a really complicated experiment where they use compressed oxygen to sterilize a chamber and then they have like an arm that kind of goes out and collects micrometeorites when it's up in space and then they put it in the sterile chamber and they're looking when they get it back for evidence of like amino acids or things like that that are on the micrometeorites so it's basically a search for extra terrestrial life or building blocks of life in our own solar system outside of earth so that's really amazing and so we got Ryan to scale back the idea a little bit alright so at first we were thinking we're going to put E. coli up into space and they didn't say no directly but of course there's a little bit of worry well you know what if the rocket crashes and you spill your E. coli in the ocean you know maybe that's not a great thing so we scaled down to DNA plasmids basically we got these plasmids that you can order pretty easily from suppliers from lab suppliers that contains a gene isolated from jellyfish where it glows under blacklight it's a the bioluminescence gene and so we flew a bunch of that and then when you bring it back if it's not damaged you can introduce it to E. coli they'll take it up and so when you grow them on a petri dish you put a blacklight over and they glow if the DNA was not damaged alright so that was sort of the crux of the experiment that we wanted to do from rock satin is look at that ok so this is the payload that they designed right so it's roughly half a canister so all together bigger than the rock on payload this is the electronics half ok so what I don't have with me is the other half which is this containment unit so it's basically 3d printed plastic unit just for holding the different vials for the DNA that we put up ok so everything that's liquid has to be double contained so basically we had tiny vials inside bigger vials and to make sure it didn't leak one student just threw a bunch of those in the dryer ran it for a while and then measured how much liquid was still in the little vials and made sure it was the amount they put in like ok that worked alright like I think I can't remember if we actually did this or if we were just planning on doing it but for spin tests you know somebody was saying well we can just go to like where they balance tires and just put it on one of those things and spin it like you can really get by with very little in terms of testing for these things we do have a 3d printer now down in the mechanical engineering lab that I believe Plattville actually owns it's part of the collaborative program Guy Campbell got it moved over from Washington County for us for a while we were trying to print that big unit but 3d printers can be kind of finicky and it's not exactly a new one so ultimately we realized one of our team members had a neighbor that works at a company that could print this thing for $260 so we just said ok go print that alright so we dealt with that instead so hopefully we'll get the 3d printer actually working to do something useful at some point soon but 3d printing is actually getting to be pretty cheap nowadays so basically we just had a bunch of those vials and so mostly they were hydrated so they were solution we did also fly some dry DNA the students did some research and they sort of they found some some papers that said that putting the DNA in liquid actually hydrating it actually made it more susceptible to damage for various reasons ok and we're looking at both radiation damage but also just the vibration and the g-forces of the launch itself it's hard to actually separate what's actually doing the damage to the DNA so we did fly some dry samples and about half of them were also wrapped in some shielding so this is where we were trying to tease out a little bit the difference between radiation damage and other damage and so one of the students found he tells this what's called silphlex tape so it's not actually an adhesive tape it's basically a silicone sort of rubbery tape that's impregnated with I think it's tin and tungsten so no lead in this, non-toxic they actually market two places like nuclear power plants so if you have like a little crease in something that you want to cover up put a bunch of this tape on so we ordered one roll of it it was the least that they would sell to us because they don't sell in tiny samples good news is we have most of the roll off over so we'll never have to buy any more of this tape again but I'll pass this around it's a little heavier than you might think but it's definitely nicer to work with than lead which is what we were previously considering using for our shielding so about half of our vials get wrapped in that tape there and then for the actual electronics package we did actually borrow some things from the rock-on design that we used in completely starting over but basically instead of one Geiger counter we have three so instead of building from scratch they just ordered pre-made Geiger counterboards and we have three different tubes on here so there's actually two different kinds of tubes one is sensitive to alpha and beta radiation the other one is sensitive to alpha, beta and gamma so these are different kinds of radiation and then one of the tubes, the one that we had two of also wrapped one of them in some Silflux tape as well to try and understand how that shielding works and so then again there's an Arduino mega Arduino mega under here they designed their own circuit board with some software and had a company in Germany print it up and send it out and a couple other basic sensors like your accelerometer and gyroscope stuff again and it looks a little fancier but this is again basically just a 9V battery that powers the whole thing and somewhere on here that's our G-switch as well so we used the same sort of G-switch technology to turn this thing on so still ultimately not super complicated you want to make things as simple as possible and if you know that something works, adapt it rather than design from the beginning so I'll pass that around for you alright so that was the whole package so half of it was DNA containment the other half was this electronics package so this is sort of what it starts to look like when you put things together so there were about half a dozen or so Rockset C teams this year most of them got a whole canister so we got a half so we were actually us in the back there and then this up front was Temple Universities that's the team that we paired with they also got half a canister which basically meant all the weight constraints and center mass constraints and things like that you have to communicate with your team that's on the other half of the canister to make sure you meet that this is actually first day check-in where they're doing some tests like your weight and rough center of mass they're checking the outside of your canister to make sure you don't have any loose wires that are putting voltage on the outside of your canister that are going to start a fire on the rocket things like that this is a picture of all the teams during Rockset C this year with the payload part of the rocket so this thing is kind of tall the payload part of the rocket would probably fit roughly across this row of tables once you actually put the rocket boosters the thing that launches on there roughly doubles in size so the whole rocket would probably not fit in this room so it's a pretty big guy they do try to do everything really on the cheap here at Wallops not like risky but as being economical and really trying to keep the cost down so that students can actually do things like this I mentioned we got half a canister that cost us $7,000 to buy onto the rocket to put something in space for only $7,000 as tiny as it is that is amazingly cheap so how do they do it? the main part of the rocket, that skin, they reuse every year the boosters that they use are actually surplus military rockets that they adapt into launch rockets they have two different kinds and they put them together so they really try to reuse and keep things cheap and use surplus parts wherever possible and they're really not making any money on this there's a lot of people at NASA donating their time for this program so the other objective that kind of went along with this once we realized what was possible with it is that aside from just looking at the damage to the DNA we decided we wanted to look at a little bit of the radiation that was coming in trying to track how that might be doing the damage and so one of my other students who is looking to go into astrophysics he's also at UW Milwaukee this year was reading up a little bit on radiation exposure in the high atmosphere and getting into space and so he learned about this thing called the photosim maximum so you might think that the higher you get in the atmosphere the more exposed to space you are so the radiation counts will go up and up and up and up well what's actually happening though is that if you look at your Geiger counter where it's just detecting counts so it doesn't distinguish between one high energy particle and one lower energy particle it's just numbers of particles that actually hits a maximum somewhere closer to like the 16 to 24 kilometer up mark part of the reason for this is something called a particle shower if one really high energy particle say a cosmic ray comes in from space and hits something in the atmosphere that can split it off into a bunch of smaller particles which had other things that split it off into a bunch of smaller particles that split it off into a bunch of other smaller particles so that's a particle shower and so you're splitting up that energy more and more among the particles so you're not really having more radiation in terms of more energy but in terms of counts that your Geiger counter would pick up that actually can increase and then eventually the atmosphere starts screening those out so it's sort of a nice calculus problem you have a growth and a decay part so you reach a maximum somewhere around that altitude so this is our secondary objective for the mission was to try and look for this closer maximum and get some better characteristics on it so this is what assembly looks like as you're actually putting the racket together this is Ryan and it's Chris Kohler from Colorado Space Grant Consortium they're plugged in in their electrostatic discharge jackets to make sure they don't short anything out putting a canister in this rack and then the couple of those racks go into the rocket skin and so this is what it looks like when they're putting it on the truck to go out to the launch base and then actually put the rocket boosters out on the launch base and that's our rock on teams from last year everybody probably holding their canisters so they're about to be integrated and so as part of the preparation one of the things they do before they send the rocket away is they do something called a spin test so they just put that part of the rocket and something that spins around and look for where it's unbalanced and I don't know if you can kind of see there are some things on the side of the rocket they have a really ingenious way of balancing this thing which is by putting weights on the outside to get it in balance they also do something called a vibe test which I'm not going to show because you can't see anything and it just sounds annoying but basically they just shake it at different frequencies really hard so when we take our payloads out there the first thing they do after the initial check is they do an integration, spin test, vibe test give it back to everybody, see what broke and see what you have to fix and make stronger and then reintegrate with the rock on ones a couple of days later our team because they were really conscientious about this and planned ahead and designed things really simply didn't really have to fix anything there were a lot of other teams but very scarily we're in the hotel room finishing their designs before the initial test and then had a whole bunch of things break and have to go back and somehow their experiments worked as far as I know but I was kind of surprised that more of them weren't super ready to go like our team was so worried that we were going to be behind like we were way ahead so we were good this is actually a picture of me with the students who went along okay so there's me, that's Ryan this is Bob Aloisi who's at Milwaukee, wants to be a national physicist he actually works in I think he had a master's degree in like paper science or something he was getting close to retirement and said hey I want to go be an astronomer, how do I get to astronomy grad school so that's what I've been helping him work on this is his son who just started at La Crosse last year that he got involved with the programming so we took him along with the trip for us and then this is Josh Janzek who is an engineering student here in the collaborative who's still around so this is them letting us sit underneath the rocket before it launches so that's what it looks like on the rail okay and you can kind of tell here there's the top section and then the two different boosters that they kind of MacGyver into there and I think I'm remembering this correctly the top sorry, the first booster here, the first stage is not actually screwed into the second one just sitting on the rail the weight of the rocket keeps it on and when then it goes up the thrust of the rocket keeps it in the first stage runs out, it just falls out the second one actually has some explosive bolts or something but you're not going to be able to see it in the video because again I was just holding up my phone and looking off here and didn't really track it up but when you're there and actually watching the launch you can actually see the first stage and the thing fall out you can watch it fall away to the ocean and even hear a splash and then you can see the second one take it up the rest of the way which is pretty neat on the right hand side there is one of the remote cameras from one of the launches way closer than we're allowed to be the closest we were able to be was this past year I think it was something like 1500 feet away from the launch pad so still ridiculously close, like it feels we should not be that close but I'm going to actually show you the launch from last year's rock on because I like the video more because on the upper left there you can actually see the moon but very similar launch to this year and I'm going to see if I can actually get the volume to work since it was working earlier but seemed to have turned off at some point so let me just try and turn that on we'll see if the volume works or not it's okay if it doesn't basically all you can hear is people counting down and then it goes like roughly a second after you see the thing go off there's your rocket up it goes, oh you can hear it a little bit okay there you go there you go, so there's your rocket and that's where I stop paying attention so that thing goes up 70 miles falls back down lands in the ocean recovery looks like, they hire a local fisherman to go fish for rockets that day they just, the thing is pressurized so it floats they try and track it by radar as far as they can, they usually get a pretty good read on where it splashes down and of course there's a big parachute that comes out and it also emits some dye so usually the boat has a pretty good idea of where to go and then they can see it from far off and so they just go haul it onto this boat which comes back into the harbor this is the picture of all the rock on rock set sea people from last year and this is the kind of data you get back so this is just sort of a rough plot of it but for example our accelerometers are all up here so in the z direction this is in the direction that you actually launch the rocket you see a big spike for the first stage another spike for the second stage or let's see do I have my gyros over here my gyroscope's over here z, x and y this thing is intentionally spun up a little bit as it's going to help keep it stable so you can see large numbers these are uncalibrated out of the sensor but basically lots of spinning around the central axis and so this is taken for the first roughly minute of the launch and then if you look at it a little further some of the other things you can look at what I plotted up there on top left was the geiger counter integrated accounts so basically a very sharp bit of data where it's kind of exposed mostly in space collecting a lot of radiation counts or like here the pressure inside the rocket kind of jostles a little bit during the launch stays pretty stable this is the point where it got back to the launch facility and then they opened it back up and depressurized the rocket so here I'm actually plotting out for hundreds of minutes afterwards this thing launches at 6 am it's back on land by like 1 or 2 pm and then they take it apart and you get your data off of your ISD card so so pretty neat so that was our rock on data from last year and so then this is what Bob put together for our Fitzer maximum study this year for this since there were a bunch of rock on teams that all had geiger counters and all that data gets put up on the rock on website he just downloaded all of that and integrated it together and made a plot of radiation counts versus altitude and that's a very nice picture of what the Fitzer maximum looks like right there so some are right around the 20 kilometer mark just like what he was looking for he got that okay and in terms of our DNA it glowed so not all of the DNA was damaged we did try to do get some good statistics on drive versus wet shielded versus unshielded also we had some control that didn't go up in the rocket basically we kind of knew this going in that with the size and weight constraints we had in the rocket we weren't going to be able to get really good statistics on this plus you're exposed to space for something like 10-15 minutes during the rocket launch so we were able to see some variations in terms of how much damage but it's hard to really interpret with the statistics we have so really what the students are thinking about doing this year or maybe next year is potentially adapting this to a weather balloon type project so something that doesn't go up as high but stays up for hours or days and you can put more DNA up there so you can get much better statistics a lot more exposure to radiation and that's something that's also a lot cheaper and a lot more attractable for students to do okay so I don't know if we'll get that off the ground for this year but if not this year they're really excited about next year potentially now in terms of all the other radiation data that we should have had from our three different Geiger boards the micro SD card kind of cracked when they were taking it out of the payload and at least two companies said they could not fix it so we don't have any of that data so this is another reason why they want to re-run the experiment in some form actually look at some of these effects of the different kinds of radiation and the shielding but it wasn't a total loss I mean it was a really great experience for the students they certainly learned a lot I mean this was really really fun for me too I mean if nothing else they designed and ran an experiment and learned how to improve it next time which is sort of what science does and they're actually looking to be around to run it again which is great like it seems like when I was an undergrad I sort of got to that phase when it was time for me to go to grad school I never actually returned to doing my initial project any better so I'm glad that they're really excited about this so hopefully we'll be able to put something together in this vein pretty soon but that's pretty much the story of our rocketry programs here so I just want to do a quick thank you of course to Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium right funding us through NASA Celebration with Platville really made it nice for us to use their lab spaces down in the new engineering building and the 3D printer as much as we got out of it Wallops Light Facility of course Virginia Space Grant Consortium helps out a little bit with the planning of rock on the rocks at sea APS is the company that did our 3D printing for us and then South High School actually machined some test parts for us for part of our payload so with that I will take any questions that you have but thank you all for coming so I did a pretty good job so clap for me alright so does anybody have any questions and Mark if you want to turn the lights on so we can see each other I like it dark in here because this gets washed out so easily any questions anybody nope because that would all be in the SD card that cracked so what we had is from the rock on people where they all just ran that one kind of geckertube so we have that so in terms of the difference with the shielding and the different kinds of tubes that should all be on there and we still have the cracked thing so maybe at some point we'll find a company that will try to do a recovery it doesn't look that bad it's not cracked all the way through but I guess just in the place that it's cracked they don't want to try and touch it now that the couple companies have decided they don't want to do it Ryan and Bob are talking about there are videos online you can see people doing this maybe we should try it just because we don't have the data anyway but we might try a couple more companies and see if they're kind of brave it seems more like they don't think it's worth the risk trying to do it because most of these companies will only charge you if they recover the data so I think they're just pessimistic enough that they don't want to bother I think it could be recovered if somebody actually did it oh well and most of the team members were very nice to the one who cracked it when they took it out I won't tell you which one it was yeah you can ask Sarah later she knows it was not you no any other questions oh boy so let's see Temple was one of the ones that was actually using the ports on the side of the rocket to collect atmospheric samples I can't remember what they were doing with them something about the composition on the atmosphere Puerto Rico ran theirs again an updated version I should mention that with all the risks associated with this after doing it for about a decade every single one of the rock and rock at sea rockets has come back recovered they've only lost one rock set X rocket and that was the one that launched last year so I know Puerto Rico their experiment that inspired Ryan that particular year they didn't actually get any data because it crashed in the ocean so they were running it again this year there were some teams that did some of the rock set teams did basically outreach kind of focus payloads where they basically did mini rock on for middle and high schoolers that's something I've actually thought about doing here in the future because it might be easier to get the funds to do something like that for some of the other rock set ones because the skin comes off they really try to stick things outside of the rocket and rock set X is easily tens of thousands to maybe more to actually do a project like that so a lot of them pair with industry partners so like aerospace companies have technologies they want to test so they sort of say we'll fund your project and give you the technology you design and build the rest of the payload and just test it for us and give us the results so there are companies that are building like different light weight booms that stick out so things that might ultimately make it onto some sort of manned space flight if you need to extend something outside of the vehicle so like they just stick these things outside of the rock set not even with anything on them right now just to sort of see do they actually extend do they break things like that so there's a wide variety of the different kind of science that they do okay you go on to the catalogs for the companies that supply for like lab supplies for biology labs basically and they have like the DNA kits like they send you a little thing with sort of standard instructions for how to rehydrate and stuff like that so it's pretty simple and not terribly expensive like an order hundreds of dollars for the DNA for this all together including like the testing supplies and all that stuff before and after that's all bad yeah because it was something easy to test right so like we also discussed you know maybe sending it out the DNA to get sequence but this was also an easy test right the black light goes yeah alright well students remember to go apply for the undergraduate scholarship for this year pretty easy way to get money so make sure you talk to me about that alright and thanks for coming everybody and on your way out don't forget to take a look at the rocket up here and I put up their poster that they presented the Rockset C team at Research in the Rotunda this year as well if you want to take a look at that so that was actually before the launch but has some more info