Findings from the ESA Education Fly a Rocket Campaign - Sensor Experiments Team

The paper summarises the endeavour of 24 students during a Fly a Rocket campaign in October 2021. The programme is an educational week-long activity aimed at university students with limited hands-on experience. The campaign took place at Andøya Space Center and was possible by the collaboration of ESA Education, Andøya Space, and the Norwegian Space Agency. The participants learnt about the fundamental aspects of a rocket launch campaign, from deciding the scientific case, rocket assembly, safety briefings and countdown procedures. The students came from diverse backgrounds, such as aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, physics, mathematics and astronomy. They were divided into three groups for the campaign: payload, telemetry and sensor experiments. The paper mainly focuses on the findings of the sensor experiments group. It first introduces the launch campaign details and the online course. Then, all the steps that went into the scientific cases, which students had to prepare, are summarised. The cases they decided to work on included a comparison of the trajectory simulation done in OpenRocket and the real-life measurements, cloud detection using optical and humidity sensors, the measurement of the spin of the rocket and the collection of data from the atmosphere that was compared to the international standard atmosphere. This paper aims to share the learning outcomes from this campaign with the wider public and students. The collaboration and responsibilities of the students taught them many important lessons, most notably the importance of diversity and the significance of cross-communication between teams