An artist’s conception shows a sampling rocket, with a tether linking a return capsule inside the rocket to a recovery craft.
Posted under: Education , Engineering , Learning , News Releases , Research , Science , Technology. During spring break the last five years, a University of Washington class has headed to the Nevada desert to launch rockets and learn more about the science and engineering involved. Sometimes, the launch would fail and a rocket smacked hard into the ground. This year, the session included launches from a balloon that were deliberately directed into a dry lakebed. Far from being failures, these were early tests of a concept that in the future could be used to collect and return samples from forbidding environments - an erupting volcano, a melting nuclear reactor or even an asteroid in space. "We're trying to figure out what the maximum speed is that a rocket can survive a hard impact,” said Robert Winglee, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, who heads that department and leads the annual trek to the desert. The idea for a project called "Sample Return Systems for Extreme Environments” is that the rocket will hit the surface and, as it burrows in a short distance, ports on either side of the nose will collect a sample and funnel it to an interior capsule.
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