By Katy Human
Daily Camera Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 21, 1998

Ten students from Lafayette's Centaurus High School and their science teacher Julie Andrew held their breaths Saturday as a NASA high­altitude rocket shot into the air from the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico.

It wasn't just a field trip: The students built some of the scientific equipment aboard.

But their equipment didn't work: The power never turned on, explained James Green, the students' adviser and a researcher at the University of Colorado's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, CASA.

Still, the students had the invaluable experience of constructing a sophisticated piece of scientific equipment, he said, and they may get another chance at launch.

Once the rocket rose above Earth's obscuring atmosphere, the students' instruments should have pointed toward the Dumbbell Nebula and quickly taken measurements of the amounts of various elements in the exploded star's outer shell. The information could have helped scientists understand a little more about the history of the Milky Way Galaxy.

But when the rocket, slowed by a parachute, drifted back down to Earth, the results were disappointing: The main experiment on board succeeded but the Centaurus students' instruments never activated.

Eric Hultgren, 17, suspects a bad electrical connection between the instruments and their power supply. "That's one of the things we weren't able to test," he said.

Hultgren hopes that in the next few months the team will be able to properly test and repair the equipment at CASA, because the equipment may get a second chance to soar above Earth's atmosphere on another high­altitude NASA rocket this fall.

Green received a $10,000 grant from NASA to fund the project, and a dozen Centaurus students, aged 16 to 18, spent the last 18 months working on it.

"They are disappointed but took it well," Green said of the experimental flop. You know, 50 percent of NASA rocket experiments fail, and sometimes the mistakes are pretty valuable."

Hultgren, who as a result of the project has decided to pursue science or engineering in college, said the trip to White Sands alone was worth the effort. "It was incredibly fun-we got to hang out with the people who actually work down there. They loved to explain all the different kinds of launch rails they have for the rocket program."