HONOLULU — As part of Project Imua 10, two University of Hawaii Community College students have been collaborating with fellow students and faculty from Windward and Honolulu community colleges for months on designing, assembling, integrating and testing a “multi-experiment payload that will be flown under the RockSat-X 2022 program.”

What You Need To Know

  • Two UH Community College students worked onsite at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia alongside NASA engineers for 10 days in June

  • Project Imua’s focus is on high-power rocketry and creating small payloads for space flight; it provides opportunities for real-world learning in various STEM fields

  • Aug. 9, 2022 is the tentatively scheduled launch date

Project Imua is a faculty-student organization of UH community college campuses that provides undergraduates opportunities for real-world, project-based learning in a variety of STEM fields. Its focus is working on high-power rocketry and creating small payloads for space flight.

According to a UH news release, students from Windward Community College designed and built a small, light-weight rocket that will convert camphor to gas to propel its release into space at the peak (apogee) of the NASA rocket’s flight. Students from Honolulu Community College designed a camera system and “inertial measurement devices” to monitor the experimental rocket’s motion.

The entire payload, mostly encased in aluminum, is less than one foot long and weighs less than 15 pounds.

The two representing students — D’Elle Martin, from Honolulu CC and Nikki Arakawa, from Windward CC — worked onsite at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia alongside NASA engineers for 10 days in June. During that time, they tested and prepared their scientific payload for a tentative Aug. 9 space launch on a NASA sounding rocket.

“The whole experience has been pretty awesome so far, and we got to meet a lot of amazing people,” said Martin.

Arakawa added, “the place where we are doing all of our testing, has not only the giant NASA ‘meatball,’ but a three-stage rocket on the front. It’s humongous and covers the whole length of one of the workshop doors. It’s very impressive, honestly.”

Honolulu CC Associate Professor and mentor Shidong Kan will escort four other UH Community College students to the NASA facility in August for the final integration of the payload onto the rocket.

Mission 10 will be the fourth time a UH Project Imua payload has been launched into space. The first Project Imua payload was launched from the same Virginia facility in 2015.

Sarah Yamanaka covers events, tourism and community news for Spectrum News Hawaii.