NHS students to build a suborbital rocket for NASA

A team of Newcastle High School students is one of 57 school teams who won in the NASA TechRise Student Challenge. This challenge gives students the opportunity to “build experiments that will autonomously operate and collect data from the edge of space aboard a suborbital rocket or a high-altitude balloon test flight,” according to a press release announcing the honor. 
“The winning teams will each receive $1,500 to build their experiments and an assigned spot to test them on NASA-sponsored suborbital rocket flights operated by Blue Origin or UP Aerospace, or a high-altitude balloon flight from Raven Aerostar,” the press release also stated. 
The NHS team  is composed of seniors Toby Johnson, Tristan Troftgruben, Gabriel Rose and Mathew Drake, and they are operating under the direction of physics teacher Zach Beam. 
Their project, titled Project BitFlip, is designed to study the occurrence of bitflips, or computing errors in devices, caused by cosmic radiation.  
“Our project is to detect the number of bitflips a processor will experience through the layers of the atmosphere. A bitflip is caused by cosmic radiation, which includes gamma rays, alpha particles, and beta particles. This radiation will hit a transistor, a part of the processor, and this causes the binary code to change, which in turn creates an error within the computations,” Drake said. 
The purpose of the device to be created by Beam’s team is to detect these bitflips, in addition to detecting alpha particles through a Geiger counter so the team can find a connection between the phenomenon and the alpha particles in particular. 
So far, the team has been researching this project and will get to the hands-on building stage soon.
“We are just getting started and have not ordered any materials yet, so we are still in the researching and planning stage. We have a good idea of what to order, so once we receive our funds, we will finalize that plan and begin,” Beam said. 
The building plans have been made, and Drake said once the project is built and tested, it will be placed on a rocket with UP Aerospace for the final experiment. According to their website, UP Aerospace, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, provides “space launch and flight test” services. They also specialize in advanced engineering, launch technology development, and rapid and low cost launch operations. 
While this project has been challenging for the team, and Drake said especially challenging with the computer science aspect, the students are excited to continue this project and see it to completion. 
“To me, I think being selected for this challenge is an amazing accomplishment. To do something for NASA is something I never thought I’d get the chance to do, but with the TechRise Challenge, it gave me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I can’t exactly speak for my teammates, but I can tell there is a great deal of excitement for this project,” Drake said.