VANDERBILT WINS USLI CLOSEST TO ALTITUDE AWARD 

The Vanderbilt University Aerospace Club has come out with flying colors competing in the recently concluded NASA Marshall sponsored University Student Launch Initiative.  The year long effort required the students to build a rocket that would carry and launch a scientific/technical payload to an altitude of one mile (5280 feet).  The competition launch was held on April 19^th at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama.  The Vanderbilt rocket reached an impressive altitude of 5264 ft, just one rocket length shy of the target!  It beat out ten other University teams, with the closest one by a margin of few hundred feet.  For this achievement, the Vanderbilt Team was awarded the prestigious ‘closest to altitude prize’.   Utah State University was declared the overall winner based on year-long assessments by the NASA panel.     

The Vanderbilt team comprised of Mechanical Engineering Seniors Glen Bartley, Thomas Folk, Andrew Gould, Nathan Grady, Chris McMenamin, Brandon Reed, Alex Sobey, Greg Todd, and ME junior Will Runge.  The team was coached by Professor Amrutur Anilkumar, and Robin Midgett, ME Department Electronics Technician, served as the safety officer.   

‘We put together an excellent team this year, and the students gladly took on the challenge of designing a rocket and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as the payload.  They came up with several innovative designs including the UAV, which was packaged inside the rocket and deployed at a pre set altitude.  This program has provided our students with amazing technical and real-life challenges and I am very proud that they handled them very well.  Most of the seniors on the team have leveraged their experiences to get excellent career offers’, says faculty advisor Professor Anilkumar. 

The Aerospace Club also won second place in the ‘Team Design’ category at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Southeastern regional competition at Cape Canaveral, Florida on April 1st.  The team presented the intricate details of the design of the rocket deployed UAV at the event, and followed up with similar presentations to the Vanderbilt Engineering Alumni Council, and the Mechanical Engineering External Advisory Committee, which were all appreciated.  

The activities of the Aerospace Club are funded by the Tennessee Space Grant Consortium and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The Aerospace Club will continue to compete in the NASA USLI competition in the near term.  It also plans to diversify its student portfolio by recruiting electrical engineers in the first phase, to assist in the avionics design, and eventually computer engineers to assist in the design of autonomous UAVs.