West Virginia Wesleyan College’s Space Club will travel to Norway in November for a sounding rocket launch that will send their projects into orbit.
On Thursday, Feb. 27 at 11 a.m., members of the Space Club will be telling the campus community more about these projects as part of a special Faculty-Student Lecture Series in the side dining hall.
The Space Club will head to Andoya, Norway this fall where they will learn more about pre-launch and post-launch processes with a sounding rocket launch. Two projects they have been developing under advisor Dr. Tracey Delaney, a Spectrometer and a Langmuir Probe, will be launched into the ionosphere to study the properties of Aurora Borealis. Making the trip are Dakota Carpenter ’28, Sonya Carper ’28, Jacob Dawson ‘25, Sneha Sundareneedi ‘27, Ezekiel Hall ‘27, Josiah Bradsher ’28, and mathematics professor Dr. Jesse Oldroyd.
Thursday’s presentation will begin with an intro by department chair Dr. Bert Popson and the opportunity to hear from three students making the trip.
Dawson, a business administration major with a minor in political science from Martinsburg, West Virginia, is the project manager for the Space Club’s trip to Norway. “I have experience in Project Management, and love learning how space works, so I joined Space Club here at WVWC,” Dawson said. Dawson will give an overview of the trip planned for November 2025. “We are so excited to make this prestigious trip to learn and experience traveling to a foreign country. Being able to do this program through NASA has been a wonderful experience and our team of students are so grateful for the opportunity.”
Thompson, of Philippi, West Virginia, is a first-generation college student pursuing a Bachelor of Science in physics. “I was introduced to Wesleyan as one of the West Virginia Metro News Scholar Finalists and received the Presidential Scholarship. “I had the honor of participating in the Summer Research Program where I studied Ionized Elemental Isotopes,” he said. I would later present my research at the APS Eastern Great Lakes Section representing the Appalachian AAPT at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. After Wesleyan, I plan to pursue a career in Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University.”
Thompson will present about Ionizing Elemental Isotopes. “This experiment was to research the process of introducing different elements into a vacuum and ionizing isotopes to determine their elements using Mass Spectrometry. This idea was used to measure Argon, Nitrogen, Tri-gas mixture, Carbon Dioxide, Propane, and an Unidentified gas. I would build on this project to ionize isotopes using the Photoelectric effect and wavelengths to break their molecular bonds.
Carper is a physics/engineering major and part of the executive boards for Space Club and Sigma Pi Sigma, physics National Honor Society. She is a WV NASA SGC student ambassador and a Space Ambassador. “I will be speaking about my journey with NASA, and the Langmuir Probe and the Spectrometer that we are building and going to Norway to launch into the ionosphere (LEO) in the northern hemisphere,” she said.
