Freshman Seminar on Airships at U of MN – Twin Cities
Students in AEM 1301: R/C Airships built and flew multiple styles of R/C blimps and also two miniature rigid airships during the fall of 2018. The “light rigid” was genuinely lighter than air (without its envelope) whereas the “heavy rigid” used both lifting gas and lifting motors to get off the ground. The class exhibited […]
New High-Power Rocket Teams Launched on Nov. 10
Six college/university rocket teams, coached through a high-power rocket build using video-delivered lessons from the MnSGC at the U of MN – Twin Cities, launched their dual-deploy kit-rockets at the Tripoli MN launch field near North Branch on Nov. 10, 2018. This fall’s teams are from Bethel University, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Paul College, University […]
InSight Lander Touches Down on Martian Surface
At approximately 1:53 PM Central Time on Monday, November 26, flight controllers and mission operations specialists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) received word from the pair of experimental Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats about the successful touchdown of the InSight lander on Mars’ Elysium Planitia. The spacecraft’s journey from Earth lasted almost seven months […]
U of MN Rocket Team Sets a Guinness World Record
Members of the U of MN (extracurricular) Rocket Team, many of whom got their start in rocketry through MN Space Grant freshman seminars, won the Alka-Rocket challenge at the Houston Space Center on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2017. Their rocket, powered by gas produced by alka-seltzer tablets dissolved in water, soared over 400 feet – establishing […]
UMN SmallSat HASP 2018
The High Altitude Student Platform (HASP) is a NASA sponsored program supported by the Louisiana Space Grant Consortium and NASA’s Balloon Program Office which allows 12-13 groups of students to build and test payloads on a scientific balloon flight for several hours at a time. The University of Minnesota has flown on HASP once a […]
The Space Grant Midwest High-Power “Efficient Supersonic” Rocket Competition coming May 2019
The MnSGC and Tripoli MN, a local high-power rocket club, are pleased to announce the 2018-2019 Space Grant Midwest High-Power Rocket Competition which will be held on May 18 & 19, 2019. In this competition college student teams are challenged to design, build, and fly a high-power rocket which can go supersonic, but do so […]
Former NASA Astronaut Pamela Melroy to visit U of MN on April 30
The MnSGC is helping sponsor a visit of Colonel Pamela Melroy, USAF Ret. and former NASA Astronaut, to the U of MN at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 30, 2018. This event is free, but pre-registration is required. For more details and a link to the registration website, go to http://www.aem.umn.edu/info/spotlight/Melroy_Lecture.shtml.
Macalester College Fields Their First High-Power Rocketry Team
In the fall of 2017 a team of physics majors at Macalester College, along with physics professor Tonnis ter Veldhuis, established a high-power rocketry team. They took “video lessons” offered by MnSGC’s James Flaten and (student) Danny Toth at the U of MN – Twin Cities and built a dual-deploy high-power rocket (pictured) which they […]
U of MN Freshmen Experience First Ballooning Flight
Fourteen freshmen from the College of Science and Engineering at the U of MN – Twin Cities got their first taste of (stratospheric) spaceflight on Sunday, Oct. 29, 2017, when their science payloads were carried to 100,000 feet on two weather balloons. The MN Space Grant promotes student interest in spacecraft-building and spaceflight by regularly […]
Great American Eclipse 2017
On August 21, 2017, the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities’ Stratospheric Ballooning Team participated in a nation-wide effort by over 50 colleges and universities to live stream a solar eclipse from the balloon-borne video cameras in the stratosphere. The team launched five high-altitude balloon stacks from Kenesaw, NE, and set up ground stations in […]