University Of Kentucky Celebrating Successful Space Capsule Experiment

Students and staff from the University of Kentucky are celebrating the success of a space experiment, reported FOX 56. The project successfully launched a pair of capsules into space.

The capsules entered the atmosphere and were set ablaze while traveling 20 times the speed of sound before landing in the Pacific Ocean.

The goal was to collect data on heat shields and how they react while traveling at blazing speeds. The data that was collected in the experiment will help scientists all over the world develop better thermal projection systems.

UK professor of mechanical engineering Dr. Alexandre Martin said, "There’s always doubt until the last minute that things aren’t going to work out. This has been a long project that started almost 10 years ago at this point, so it was very good to see that things worked out better than we expected."

UK student John Schmidt said, "It validated all the work I had done. All the meetings and hours I put into it for the past year and a half. I was overjoyed to see that we got a response from the spacecraft, and we have experimental data."

“It’s very exciting and rewarding to conduct this research and to see it all work out like that,” Schmidt said.