Mechanical Engineering student built and launched a rocket through CaNoRock exchange program

Mechanical Engineering student Marcy Frioult is walking on air since returning from the Andoya Rocket Range with the Canada-Norway Student Sounding Rocket (CaNoRock) exchange program.

“CaNoRock was amazing!” said Frioult, a fourth year co-op student. “It was the perfect balance between learning through classroom lectures and learning through hands-on activities like building sensors and model rockets.”
CaNoRock is a partnership between the Universities of Alberta, Oslo, Calgary, and Saskatchewan in which undergraduate students spend a week on Norway’s North Sea coast learning about, building, and launching a rocket. This year’s program ran from January16 to 20, 2012.

Frioult said CaNoRock was an extremely valuable learning experience. “We learned about the physics behind the rocket and the atmosphere, we built and launched model rockets, and we did computer modeling and predictions of the rocket’s trajectory and speed for a pre-launch meeting,” said Frioult. “After the launch we went through the data collected during the rocket flight and prepared a comparison of our preflight model predictions and the actual data.”

During the rocket’s launch, Frioult was in the control room with the important role of Student Head of Operations. “As the one in the launch control room, I was the one checking in with all of the teams and testing for go or no-go situations.”

While she said the program was very well planned and superbly run, sometimes unexpected surprises can arise. As the students were counting down in preparation to launch the rocket, they were suddenly told to hold the launch. “There were fishing boats in our trajectory path. Apparently it was cod season!” recalled Frioult.
Fortunately, they were able to launch the rocket soon after and all turned out well. “We launched the rocket, and it was fantastic,” says Frioult adding the rocket reached an altitude of approximately 10 kilometres above the earth.

For Frioult, whose future plans involve both graduate studies and a career in the aerospace industry, CaNoRock was the perfect experience.“CaNoRock is a great opportunity for those of us interested in a space-related career, not because of what we learned, but because of the people we met and the connections we made,” she said.
“I think the best part of the CaNoRock program is it shows us as students how much opportunity there are for us to get into this industry.”