Over the summer, AACC students Logan Hokanson and Rob Sampson-Krebs participated in the 2025 RockOn! workshop at the Goddard Space Flight Center Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. RockOn is a five-day workshop within NASA’s RockSat Program.
Hokanson and Sampson-Krebs worked with NASA experts and AACC Associate Professor Deborah Levine, Ph.D., to create a sounding rocket experiment that measured data points such as acceleration, humidity, pressure, temperature and radiation count.
“It's a good way for the students to network with the NASA folks at Wallops, the other colleges, other students,” Levine said. “The point is to learn how to do the process. Everybody's building the same experiment, but we are comparing the data that we got on the ground.”
Twenty-eight teams from schools around the country participated. Levine and Hokanson both enjoyed the networking and comradery among the different schools. Hokanson noted how the series of programs is more than inspiring. It’s a pipeline to get connected to a community and future careers. The lack of previous experience needed made it “almost too easy” to get involved.
“The more you just walk around and just ask questions and say hi, then the more people will talk to you and just give you more and more information,” Hokanson said.
In the upcoming year, Hokanson and others will analyze the data collected during the launch and develop a research article to be submitted to AACC’s Journal of Emerging Scholarship. AACC will also form a team for the RockSat-C Program. RockSat-C is the next level in the series that allows students to design, build and fly a more complicated experiment on a Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket.
Anyone interested in participating should reach out to Levine or the Super Science Club.