Inver Hills Students Prepare for First NASA Rocketry Competition Launch

Ambition, curiosity and determination are taking a team of Inver Hills students — and their handmade, high-power rocket — to new heights.

The group of student engineers and rocketry aficionados — dubbed the Inver Thrills University Student Launch Initiative team — is among 33 college teams that will participate this spring in the 2010-2011 NASA University Student Launch Initiative (USLI) competition in Huntsville, Ala.

They are one of only two community colleges in the contest, and both will square off against major universities like Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As part of the competition, the students must launch a 10- to 15-foot rocket carrying a scientific payload before NASA engineers the week of April 13.

Over an eight-month-long process, the team designed, built and tested their rocket at the Minnesota Amateur Spacemodeler Association (MASA) launch site in Nowthen, Minn. The rocket’s scientific payload contains an experiment that takes temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, solar irradiance, and ultra violet radiation measurements during descent – enabling the team “to study the lower atmosphere from a meteorological point of view,” according to their Flight Readiness Review, a final report presented to a panel of NASA engineers via teleconference.

A final full-scale test flight was conducted Mar. 14, and was a success, according to said team member Max Miranda. “The rocket flew 4,815 feet. When we travel to Huntsville, Ala. next month, our goal is to make it go 5,000 feet high.”

If the rocket reaches a height of exactly 5,280 feet — or one mile — the team will receive a perfect score on altitude, team member Caleb Boe said. However, faculty advisor Dr. Anand Vyas warns that emphasis is placed on precision: The flight height must not exceed 5,280 feet, or the team will be penalized.

Pioneering “A Novel Process”
The Inver Thrills USLI team organized in Sept. 2010, after Boe completed one of Dr. Vyas’s engineering classes at Inver Hills Community College. He met fellow student and team member Bryan Sullivan and, together with Dr. Vyas, the three aspired to start a USLI team. They prepared by attending a NASA Advanced Rocketry Workshop in July.

Dr. Vyas acknowledges Prof. William Garaard, Minnesota Space Grant Consortium director, as instrumental in supporting their trip to the Advanced Rocketry Workshop in Huntsville, Ala.

Two MASA members, Dr. Ted Cochran and Mr. Todd Schweim, volunteer their time to mentor the team and provide invaluable support. The team also recently recruited local meteorologist Russ Durkee, who helped the team in finding solutions to their payload challenges.

Reaching for the Stars
The team's high-level competitors haven't intimidated the Inver Hills students. If anything, the fierce competition drives them.

“We’re going up against university-level teams made up of aerospace engineering grad students,” Sullivan said. “As a community college, we want to show that even students like us have the ability to compete in a competition like this. Almost every day, we are thinking about questions such as: How can we change this design to make it better? What can we do to make our team stand out?”

When the team’s proposal was accepted, team spirit soared and “ideas flew left and right,” said Sullivan.

Structural engineer and team member Emily Nilsen said that it is the desire “to be a part of an experience of a lifetime” that inspires and drives her team. Curiosity also plays a major part.

“We want to see if all of our hard work will pay off and we have a successful flight with everything working as planned.”

She says many teammates did not have prior rocketry experience and learned the rocket-building process firsthand. “[For them,] this was a great opportunity to learn something new...about the process of a project that real engineers would go through on a job, and...working as a team and making sure everyone is involved with the construction and design of the rocket.”

The "tremendous learning experience” this competition offers is a big incentive for each team member, Sullivan said. It is the team's first time competing in the USLI contest.

That’s true for the team’s faculty advisor as well.

“We’re all learning; it is a novel process,” Dr. Vyas said. “I see my role as a facilitator, to make sure they have the supplies they need, and give advice on organizational issues. My purpose is to have the students experience the overall engineering world. To let them grow, I have to hold myself back. It is amazing to see them be creative and free.”

From building all interior rocket parts, to conducting flight and ground tests, to making repairs, “the immense amount of time that the students spent [working on the project] was unbelievable,” remarked Dr. Vyas. “I have no words to praise them. They sacrificed their weekends, time between classes, whatever time besides what was absolutely necessary to sustain themselves…in the creation [of the rocket], they’ve not had [much] resting time.

“It was not because I pushed them,” he added. “Caleb was a main motivator — [he is] just amazing — he showed leadership by example and was so passionate that it rubs off [on fellow teammates].”

Since this is the team’s first experience in the competition and they are up against junior- and senior-level students with more engineering experience, Dr. Vyas says that winning is not the main goal. Instead, it is to reach the milestone of “being able to launch [at NASA] and not failing.”

“We will do the best we can do at the USLI launch week,” says Boe. “Our hope is that our rocket flies successfully and the payload works as planned.”

MEMBERS OF THE INVER THRILLS USLI TEAM:

Caleb Boe, Cottage Grove — Team Leader
Bryan Sullivan, Apple Valley — Assistant Team Leader
Colin Fennern, Cannon Falls — Recovery Engineer
Alex Grant, Eagan — Payload Engineer
Trang Tran, Eagan (originally from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) — Recovery Engineer
Max Miranda, Inver Grove Heights — Public Relations Officer
Jon Jones, South St. Paul — English Major
Katrina Koenders, Eagan — Payload Engineer
Colin Rudnitski, Mounds View — Payload Engineer
Emily Nilsen, Inver Grove Heights — Structural Engineer
Eric Lee, Inver Grove Heights — Structural Engineer
Nguyen Nguyen, Rosemount (originally from Phan Thiet, Vietnam) — Structural Engineer
Josiah Hanka, Cannon Falls — Webmaster
Rayme Tindell, Woodville, Wis. — Software Engineer

Josiah Bowe and Pilot Hassan are recent newcomers to the team, as student observers.