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Definition of sounding rocket
: a rocket used especially to obtain information concerning atmospheric conditions at various altitudes
Examples of sounding rocket in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web This article has been updated to reflect the creation of a BEC on board a sounding rocket in 2017 by Germany's MAIUS 1 (Matter-Wave Interferometry in Microgravity) experiment.
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Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, "Chilling out: Physicists create exotic “fifth form of matter” on board the ISS," 15 June 2020 In April 2021, the team plans to launch a sounding rocket carrying the Beam Plasma Interactions Experiment, a miniature accelerator that would create a beam of electrons, which in turn would generate VLF waves capable of sweeping up particles.
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Richard Stone, Science | AAAS, "U.S. tests ways to sweep space clean of radiation after nuclear attack," 26 Dec. 2019 Conditions on Mars are far colder, and the ascent vehicle’s exposure time will be far longer than, say, sounding rockets launched into Earth’s aurora borealis from inside the Arctic Circle.
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Robin George Andrews, Scientific American, "Rocks, Rockets and Robots: The Plan to Bring Mars Down to Earth," 6 Feb. 2020 Special craft called sounding rockets, which are comparatively cost-effective to launch, give researchers a chance to study inside zero-gravity environments for a few minutes at a time.
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Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, "Hey, Let's Burn Some Metal in Zero Gravity," 8 Nov. 2019 After four failed tests, the V-2 rocket lifted off from a missile range in New Mexico, releasing a second-stage sounding rocket that attained Mach 6.7.
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Richard Stone, Science | AAAS, "‘National pride is at stake.’ Russia, China, United States race to build hypersonic weapons," 8 Jan. 2020 And in the burgeoning private spaceflight industry, entrepreneurs can use existing sounding rocket infrastructure to get a sense of what their own startup could turn out to be.
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Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, "Hey, Let's Burn Some Metal in Zero Gravity," 8 Nov. 2019 Sandia National Laboratories launched two sounding rockets from Hawaii last week, the fourth and fifth such launches, respectively, of the HOT SHOT program.
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Eric Berger, Ars Technica, "Rocket Report: Cause of Vega failure found, China seeks rocket customers," 6 Sep. 2019 The answer lay in its UV spectrum, which is difficult to capture from a sounding rocket.
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Daniel Clery, Science | AAAS, "Could humanity’s return to the moon spark a new age of lunar telescopes?," 18 July 2019
See MoreThese example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'sounding rocket.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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Time Traveler for sounding rocket
The first known use of sounding rocket was circa 1945
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