News/Events

The MnSGC is running an Intercollegiate Quadcopter Challenge for student teams from colleges and universities around the state. In this ~six-month-long activity the teams, plus their faculty advisor, will build a quadcopter from a kit, outfit it with cameras and microcontroller-logged sensors, then use it to “explore” an indoor area. An in-person fly-off will be […]

The MnSGC and Tripoli MN, a local high-power rocketry club, are hosting the 2019-2020 Space Grant Midwest High-Power Rocket Competition in May of 2020. In this competition college student teams will design, build, and fly a high-power rocket to accomplish a “photography/altitude” challenge in which they will try to minimize roll during ascent to get […]

The MnSGC and Tripoli MN, a local high-power rocket club, hosted the 2018-2019 Space Grant Midwest High-Power Rocket Competition on May 18 and 19, 2019. In this competition college student teams designed and built high-power rockets to go supersonic but as “efficiently” as possible. Team presentations about rocket designs were held at the Split Rocks […]

On Monday, April 29, 2019, college/university students around the nation were invited to watch a live-stream of “The Future in Space” featuring NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and including a link-up with astronauts on-board the International Space Station. If you missed the webcast, you can watch a recording of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW-j7XGb2yc  

States from the Midwest Region of NASA’s Space Grant program held a videocon on April 19 containing three back-to-back “short talks.” The three topics for this videocon were (a) Teaching Introductory Physics Using High-Power Rocketry, (b) Doing Plant Genetics Research on the ISS, and (c) Using Rideable Hoverboards for “Astronaut Training.” See this flier for […]

On Monday, April 15, 2019, at 10:00am in the Hoversten Chapel on-campus at Augsburg University, the Minnesota Space Grant Consortium will be jointly hosting a guest lecture by the renowned Dr. Pamela Ronald. Pamela Ronald is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center, University of California, Davis. Ronald studies rice […]

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 […]

The MnSGC is co-sponsoring a lecture by Roger Launius, Chief Historian for NASA and Senior Curator of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (now retired), in the Best Buy Theater in Northrop Auditorium on the U of MN East Bank campus at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019. This free public lecture is entitled […]

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 […]

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 […]