News/Events

The MnSGC and Tripoli MN, a local high-power rocket club, hosted the 2017-2018 Space Grant Midwest High-Power Rocket Competition on May 19 & 20, 2018. In this competition college student teams were challenged to design, build, and fly a high-power rocket with “active roll/orientation control” using which they tried to quash roll, during one competition […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Five new high-power rocket college teams, coached through a high-power rocket build using video-delivered lessons from the MnSGC at the U of MN – Twin Cities, successfully flew their dual-deploy kit-rockets at the Tripoli MN launch field near North Branch on Nov. 11, 2017. The teams came from from Augsburg University, Concordia College, Macalester College, […]

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 […]

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 […]

The University of Minnesota – Twin Cities’ Stratospheric Ballooning Team participated in an eclipse exhibit at the U of M’s Physics and Nanotechnology Building in conjunction with the Bell Museum of Natural History on Sunday, August 13. The event was hosted in an effort to educate the general public on the much-anticipated solar eclipse that […]

On November 7, 2017, former astronaut Daniel Brandenstein visited the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities to award Astronaut Scholarships to two undergraduate students, Merrick Pierson Smela and Rahul Parhi. The scholarship was created in 1985 by the Mercury 7 astronauts to encourage the study of science and engineering. These scholarships are awarded to students […]

On October 27 and 28, 2017, the MN Space Grant at the U of MN – Twin Cities is hosting a national post-eclipse stratospheric ballooning conference – AHAC 2017 – for teams from around the country to gather and share their eclipse-ballooning results and talk about their experiences. Over 100 attendees have registered and abstracts […]