The Star Tracker 5000, a rocket guidance device, has flown again.
This device is licensed by NASA and was developed exclusively by the UW-Madison Department of Astronomy’s Space Astronomy Laboratory.
The Star Tracker 5000 (ST5000) is used for NASA's Sounding Rockets Program, helping guide research rockets into suborbital skies.
Usually, the missions are launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and observe astrophysical objects at ultraviolet wavelengths.
In an entirely new application, the ST5000 recently flew in support of an Earth Sciences experiment, PolarNOx (Virginia Tech), which was designed to measure the amount of nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas - in our atmosphere.
This time, the rocket and ST5000, were launched from the Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska on February 5th, 2011.
Instead of staring upward at a distant astronomical target, the rocket stared down tangentially to the Earth looking at a distant star backlighting the atmosphere.
The star's light was altered by its interactions with nitrous oxide, revealing details about the amount and distribution of the gas.
The guidance offered from the ST5000 on suborbital research rockets gives investigators inexpensive access to space for astrophysics, solar and atmospheric research programs, usually centered on a graduate student's thesis research.
The Department of Astronomy is NASA's sole supplier of these next-generation, high precision digital gyroscopes that help guide the suborbital rockets and their science payloads to a point with high precision at distant targets.
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