Copper Hills High School science teacher lands class with NASA

A lot of kids dream of being astronauts and working at NASA, but very few have that chance. During summer break, Copper Hills High School science teacher Matt Lund had the chance to not only work with NASA, but build rocket ships with some of the world’s leading minds in the field.

“It was an amazing opportunity to work with the head scientist on the Jupiter mission,” Lund said. “To hear first hand how the mission is going and to ask questions, it was an amazing week.”

Lund participated in the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students at the Wallop’s flight center on Chincoteague Island, Vir., as one of 24 teachers chosen nationwide. The week-long workshop focused on rocket building and data collection. Teachers built a three-foot-long rocket, engineered a payload sensor from scratch to record acceleration, temperature and pressure and studied parachute design among other things.

“So much of what we learned has application in the classroom,” Lund said. “Science is not just about learning facts. It’s learning how science works and why.”

Wallops flight center is part of NASA’s Goddard Space Center that builds and launches 50-200 sounding rockets into space for scientific studies and for the military each year.

“The workshop gave me background information about other rocket programs,” Lund said. “Now when students ask if NASA is dead, I will be able to explain the many other ways NASA is still exploring space, like the Sounding Rocket program. I can also share with students more about how rockets work and how to calculate their paths and use specific examples to explain the constant question of ‘How am I ever going to use this?’”