SESDA Team Supports Two Successful Sounding Rocket Launches
November 20, 2023
Congratulations to SESDA engineers and their colleagues in the Ionospheric, Thermospheric, Mesospheric (ITM) Physics Laboratory (Code 675) for their support of two successful sounding rocket launches from Poker Flats, Alaska. The first rocket (Dissipation, top image) launched on November 8th to study how solar wind charged particles dissipate their energy in the high latitude ionosphere-thermosphere. The second rocket (Beam-Plasma Interactions or BeamPI below) launched on November 9th to study how charged particles created by a pulsed electron beam rain down along Earth’s magnetic field lines. SESDA personnel played critical roles in the design and development of each rocket’s intricate payloads which included fabricating hardware components, performing integration and testing (I&T), and traveling to Poker Flats to support launch operations.
