![]() ![]() Blue Knight Productions (2013, March 5) Wallops Island, Virginia.But the arrival of Hurricane Sandy a few months later destroyed about 20 percent of the newly-built beach.Įarth Observatory images by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using data provided by the U.S. The natural action of waves and tides transports sand from north to south, but the hook-shaped tip of Assateague (Fishing Point) traps much of it and deprives Wallops Island of sand. A beach nourishment project completed in 2012 reinforced Wallop’s shoreline. Much of the Atlantic shoreline of Wallops island has been lined with a stone seawall to protect launch infrastructure from ongoing erosion and shoreline retreat. Wallops’ P-3 Orion, for instance, is the key aircraft supporting Operation IceBridge, a multi-year survey of polar ice. To the north, the main campus of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility serves as home base for a range of aircraft used to conduct earth science research. On the mainland, the Wallops Geophysical Laboratory appears as a line of four white dots. A causeway and bridge connect the island with the Delmarva peninsula. A variety of launch-related infrastructure is visible along the coast, including rocket storage and assembly buildings, launch pads, and protective sea walls. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this image of Wallops Island and the surrounding area on May 3, 2014. Both the Antares and Cygnus were built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, a Virginia-based aerospace company. The Antares will carry an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft loaded with 3,293 pounds (1,493 kilograms) of supplies to the International Space Station. Weather permitting, the Antares or its contrail will be visible in Washington, DC, after 90 seconds in Philadelphia after 120 seconds in New York City after 150 seconds and in Boston after 210 seconds. At that time, a thirteen-story Antares rocket is scheduled to lift off from launch pad 0A. Residents from South Carolina to Massachusetts should have an opportunity to see one of these larger rockets if they look toward the island starting at 12:52 p.m. While most involved modestly-sized meteorological and sounding rockets, the completion of launch pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in 2011 has made it possible to launch larger and more powerful rockets. Since then, more than 14,000 rockets have lifted off. On July 4, 1945, NASA’s predecessor-the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)-launched the first rocket from Wallops, making the island one of the oldest launch sites in the world. Today, the island is the site of a thriving spaceport that launches several commercial and government rockets each year. This year's batch of student payloads includes 32 experiments from the RockOn Program, eight from RockSat-C and more than 60 small cubesats built by middle and high school students as part of a program called " Cubes in Space.More than seventy year ago, wild ponies roamed the marshes and beaches of Wallops Island, a barrier island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The student experiments are designed to measure things like telemetry and environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, pressure and radiation. So, 34 of the experiments are instead going to fly on a high-altitude balloon mission from Ft. The students built their experiments via the national student rocketry programs RockOn and RockSat-C, both run by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium in partnership with NASA Wallops.ĭespite the pandemic, the student rocketeers were able to successfully construct more scientific payloads than ever before - so many that they would not all fit on one rocket, NASA said. A Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket stands ready for launch at NASA Wallops, in June 2019. ![]()
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