PARTNERS Space Grant Success Stories

On April 24, Arizona Space Grant students were invited to an exclusive event marking the arrival of the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Gilbert, Arizona. With Gateway as a key element of the NASA-led Artemis missions to enable sustained lunar exploration to pave the way to Mars and beyond, HALO’s arrival marks Gateway’s first major hardware milestone.

Faculty mentor, Eddie Ong, says that the AZSGC high-altitude ballooning program gives students hands-on experience that "is typically not introduced until a student’s senior year of college or graduate school, so its availability for community college students builds a pipeline of competent transfer students who continue their education at university, often as a cohort to support each other."

On Saturday, April 1st, teams from across the state of Arizona launched their 3lb payloads on two high-altitude weather balloons as part of the Arizona Space Grant’s ASCEND program. Photo credit: Iván González López, Phoenix College ASCEND team lead.

The ASCEND program's Fall 2022 launch was on November 19th. For this program, students are tasked to design, build, and then launch payloads each semester on high-altitude weather balloons. This year, we launched two balloons. Balloon #1 reached 100,420 ft and Balloon #2 reached 102,272 ft.

Phoenix College engineering student, Sandra Montero, is one of five Arizona Space Grant students that has been selected to participate in the 2022 Space Camp at Biosphere 2 (SCB2) program.

ASCEND is a statewide high-altitude ballooning program where student teams design, build, fly, and analyze data from small payloads. GCC's "Space Force Crew" is preparing for launch this Fall 2021. Stay up to date with their progress by checking out their website!

Phoenix College ASCEND program lead, Jacqueline Do, attended the launch on October 16th, 2021. "Over the next 12 years, Lucy will fly by one main-belt asteroid and seven Trojan asteroids, making it the agency’s first single spacecraft mission in history to explore so many different asteroids."

This article provides insight into Ernest Villicaña's unfaltering commitment to the program, and we can't thank Ernest enough for all of the ways he continues to move the ASCEND program forward.

Dr. Proctor was the AZ Space Grant ASCEND (balloon payload design program) mentor at South Mountain Community College from 2007-2011. Image Credit: AZ Central.