On August 11, 2022, at 6:09 p.m. EDT, students from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility watch as their experiments take off on a sounding rocket for the RockSat-X program. The tests were carried to a height of 99 miles by the Terrier-Improved Malemute rocket, which then descended via a parachute and landed in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Observation and Detection Interpreted by Neural-networks (ODIN) payload team from Capitol Technology University recently witnessed the successful launch of NASA’s RockSat mission on June 24, 2026. Their contribution to the mission’s research efforts was carried aboard the sounding rocket in the form of a special custom payload created with artificial intelligence (AI) acting as a trained “on-board scientist” to assess and prioritize scientific data while in flight.
The ODIN crew arrived at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to see their payload lift off, capping more than a year of design, development, and testing activities. Equipped with payloads that collected data while in space, the RockSat Terrier Improved Malemute rocket ascended to a height of more than 200 miles before parachuting back to Earth.
To develop something amazing, the ODIN team—Philip Alsop, Zoé Denito, Eddie Zhou, Daniel Geer, Elijah Mister, Owen Coffee, Jason Gedlu, Taylor Fryer, James Gross, and Joe Moser—brought together experts in computer science, data science, and astronautical engineering. Together, they developed a payload that might take use of the current low-power/low-cost AI GPUs. After that, they built an AI model to analyze data from scientific sensors and identify “interesting” information that could be sent right away to the ground using an Iridium commercial communication antenna. As part of their payload, the team was allowed to attach this antenna on the outside of the NASA rocket.
