Winter 2017 PEG

MEMBER NEWS

Movers & Shakers ENGINEERING STUDENTS HIT THEIR PAYLOAD AT ROCKET

COUNTDOWN TO LAUNCH Callie Lissinna and a Norwegian student (left) prepare for launch in the telemetry and data collection room at Andoya Space Center.

SCIENCE CRASH-COURSE For University of Alberta engi-

neering student Callie Lissinna , an APEGA university student member under our ASAP program, some highlights particularly stand out after her mid-October visit to the Andoya Space Center on the far northern tip of Norway, a few degrees north of the Arctic Circle: 1. Eating waffles that were, figura- tively speaking, out of this world. 2. Watching a spectacular aurora borealis display with other, equally thrilled engineering and astrophysics students. Oh, wait. One other thing: launching a rocket into space. “Who would've imagined that U of A students could travel to Norway for a crash-course in rockets?” says Ms. Lissinna. The students were part of the 14th annual Canada-Norway Stu- dent Sounding Rocket (CaNoRock) exchange program, a partnership between the universities of Alberta, Calgary, and Saskatchewan, the Royal Military College, the University of Oslo, and the space centre. Ms. Lissinna, along with fellow engineering students Kinza Malik and Suey Fong , and engineering

-photo courtesy Callie Lissinna

physics student Taryn Haluza-DeLay — all ASAP participants, too — were the U of A’s first all-female team to take part in CaNoRock. Three students from the University of Calgary’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, four students from the University of Saskatchewan, and 10 Norwegian students also took part. Working together, they built a single-stage sounding rocket to collect data about the atmosphere. “It flew sensors for temperature, pressure, magnetic field strength, light, and acceleration,” explains Ms. Lissinna. After the launch, the students initially thought the rocket wasn’t working, because of a few anomalous data points they discovered. But a rocketry expert deemed their data very clean, explaining that such results were typical and even expected. This wasn’t Ms. Lissinna’s first rocket mission. She’s a veteran of the AlbertaSat student team, which built and launched the Ex-Alta 1 satellite that’s currently orbiting Earth and measuring space weather patterns.

WINTER 2017 PEG | 17

Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker