Rocket school
November 2, 2009U of C student blasts off to rocket school
Physics major Benjamin Blumer off to Norway for week-long course
Benjamin Blumer has been accepted into the Canadian-Norway Rocket Exchange (CaNoRock) program.
It’s a good thing Benjamin Blumer will be dealing with rockets and not rock music.
Roommates of Blumer were recently awoken by the fourth-year physics student belting a song of “I’m going to Norway,” after receiving an email stating he had been accepted into the Canadian-Norway Rocket Exchange (CaNoRock) program.
“When I was young I liked to build stuff,” says 20-year-old Blumer. “Everyone told me to go into engineering, but I liked the purity of physics over engineering.”
Blumer will fly to the Scandinavian country to build and launch sounding rockets as part of a class offered by the University of Oslo. Joining Blumer for the intense, week-long course running from Nov. 9-13 are four other students—two undergrads from the University of Saskatchewan as well as one undergrad and one grad student from the University of Alberta.
In Norway, Blumer and the others will learn about payload instrument design and see hands-on how to construct and launch sounding rockets. A sounding rocket carries instruments which take measurements and performs scientific experiments during sub-orbital flight.
The rockets, electronics, sensors and various systems built by the students will be launched from the Andoya Rocket Range on a northern island in Norway. They will travel around 10 kilometres high and take various readings such as temperature and pressure levels.
The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and the Canadian Space Agency are covering the costs of Blumer’s exchange.
David Knudsen, associate professor in the physics and astronomy department, helped establish the program at the University of Calgary. “I was looking at third and fourth-year students,” says Knudsen. “And someone with an A-B range GPA. We want to put our best foot forward.”
Blumer says he became interested in rocket science just recently and that being exposed to a field that you know nothing about is part of its appeal. “There are a lot of commercial possibilities, and these possibilities will continue to grow,” Blumer says. “Looking at grad school, this is the best way to see what rocket science is really like.”
Knudsen says the class will give Blumer a window in this research area. The U of C has been a world leader in space instrumentation for more than 40 years, and currently have three alumni playing key roles in the International Space Station program. Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, BSc’76, LLD’09, is five months into his six-month long-duration stay on the ISS. Supporting him in the mission are Laura Lucier, BSc’99, a graduate from the Schulich School of Engineering who is a mission-planner and flight-controller with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA in Houston, and Doug Hamilton, MD’91, PhD’91, who is Thirsk’s deputy flight surgeon on the mission, responsible for keeping him healthy.
