Mechanical Engineering student Marcy Frioult (second from left) and colleagues hold up a rocket at the Andoya Rocket Range in Norway.

Edmonton—Mechanical Engineering student Marcy Frioult has taken an important step towards her goal of becoming an aeronautics engineer, after visiting the Andoya Rocket Range with the Canada-Norway Student Sounding Rocket (CaNoRock) exchange program.

“It was the perfect balance between learning through classroom lectures and learning through hands-on activities like building sensors and model rockets,” said Frioult, who is in the co-op engineering program.  

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 and launching a rocket. Frioult says 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,” said Frioult.

The team launched a sounding rocket to an altitude of 10 kilometres, then analyzed flight data.

“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 the program was well planned and superbly run, the team did run into the unexpected. 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,” Frioult said. Fortunately, the team was able to launch the rocket soon after and all turned out well. “We launched the rocket, and it was fantastic.”

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.