Montana Tech Students and Faculty Reach New Heights at NASA’s RockOn! Workshop

This summer, a talented group from Montana Technological University traveled to the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to participate in the prestigious, hands-on RockOn! Workshop.

Led by Electrical Engineering Department Head Dr. Bryce Hill, Montana Tech students Rhyker Mohr and Garrett Johnson spent an intensive week working directly alongside NASA engineers and researchers. Over the course of the program, the team gained invaluable experience building scientific payloads from the ground up, programming microcontrollers, and preparing their custom experiments for suborbital flight.

“I was lucky to be the advisor of one of the 24 teams invited to the RockOn! Workshop,” said Hill. “We spent a week building a sensor array to be put in a sounding rocket, then the rocket was launched into space. It was an excellent experience for the students and myself. It is a very unique experience building something, watching it be loaded into a rocket payload, then collecting the device afterwards to utilize the data. We collected data from a Geiger counter, accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature and humidity sensor, and magnetometer. In addition, we were able to tour the Wallops Flight Facility, the NOAA central site, and walk around the mall in Washington DC. It was time well spent with students.”

Video of the launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU4NzyMkXCM

Video of payload recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6xMOKA8lwE

To learn more about Montana Tech’s Electrical Engineering program, visit www.mtech.edu/electrical-engineering/.