Waking up early has become almost second nature at this point, but we were all still yawning on our way to the launch. We were out the door and on our way to the launch pad at 4:00am. Once we arrived, they launched some test rockets, and then our rocket launched at 5:30am (see the video below)!
The video doesn't do it enough justice! Even for those of us that had seen the rocket launch in previous years, it was absolutely surreal. Our work was far from done though. We still needed to retrieve the rocket, so we could get our payload and its data. Then, we could go through the SD cards, make sure we collected data, and analyze it.
In the meantime, there was a short debriefing held in Building E-100. At the debriefing, the key word was "unremarkable," which sounds bad but is good when you want everything to fly without a hitch. All of the engineers said that this has been their best year yet for RockSat-C and one of their best launches of a sounding rocket. There was beautiful weather (check out the picture below), few mosquitoes, and a fast retrieval.
After the debriefing, our team and others went to the marina to welcome the rocket and its crew with a standing ovation. The NASA boat retrieved the rocket from the surrounding waters in record time. Once the boat was docked, it was moved onto the truck, and the truck was taken to Wallops for de-integration. The rocket was found, loaded onto the ship, loaded onto the truck, and then headed to Wallops all by 10:00am!
At Wallops, de-integration went by very quickly. Time seemed to fly by as the NASA engineers took the rocket off the truck, de-integrated all the canisters, and we were given the nuts and bolts that had been in space as souvenirs. Before we knew it, we had the full canister in our hands, as well as certificates of completion (see below), and tickets to a celebratory dinner that night!
After receiving the full canister, we didn't waste any time de-integrating our half so we could look at the data from the payload. We carefully extracted all the SD cards from the payload on-site and...there was data collected on each card! That means that our batteries were able to power the payload for the duration of the flight, and it means that our sensors used in our subsystems wrote data to usable files that we could then analyze later. Everything worked as planned - SUCCESS! Now that we knew we had a successful mission, we could prepare for the celebratory dinner at Bill's PRIME Seafood & Steaks. NASA foots the bill (pun intended) and all the people involved with the launch (including us!) had an all-you-can-eat rewarding dinner. Thank you, NASA! Take a look at how much we liked the dessert below.
All that's left to do now is return to campus and analyze the data. We still have a lot of work to do with the final report and our final conclusions, but this trip was out of this world!