SPIRIT provides the opportunity for students from a wide range of educational backgrounds to gain hands-on experience in the design and fabrication of a research sounding rocket. The 30-month project, part of the NASA Student Launch Program, enhances classroom experience while emphasizing creativity, collaborative learning and time management skills. Members of SPIRIT are constructing a rocket that will deploy experiments to measure temperature in the mesosphere, the middle layer of the atmosphere. 

     More than 50 Penn State undergraduate students have collaborated with Penn State faculty and NASA engineers to accomplish their goals. Ranging from freshmen to seniors and from electrical, mechanical and aerospace engineering to public relations and education majors, the students have diverse interests and backgrounds. 

     Students from SUNY-Geneseo and Lincoln University have also contributed to the project. The Geneseo students have designed and fabricated one of the five atmospheric experiments. 

    To accomplish the major tasks to ensure the success of the rocket, students organized into five groups --  experiments, power and wiring, publicity and outreach, structures and telemetry. 

     The 36-foot, two-stage, NASA Nike-Orion rocket will reach an apogee, or highest point, of 75 miles.  During its ascent the on-board experiments will begin to record measurements. Some will deploy from the rocket and others will register data from inside of the rocket. After reaching apogee, the rocket will descend with its parachute opening up 15-20 km above the earth. The parachute will slow the rocket's plunge into the Atlantic Ocean, where it will be retrieved by the U.S. Coast Guard. NASA will test a new recovery module during the SPIRIT flight that will allow it to recover and re-use payloads.