sounding rocket

noun

|Updated on: 25 May 2018

Definition of sounding rocket

: a rocket used especially to obtain information concerning atmospheric conditions at various altitudes

Recent Examples of sounding rocket from the Web

Of course, the trade-off is that sounding rockets have a brief mission life.

— joe pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, "Meet the Space Cowboys Launching Telescopes From the Middle of Nowhere," 12 Apr. 2018
Traveling at a moment’s notice is a sounding rocket badge of honor.

— joe pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, "Meet the Space Cowboys Launching Telescopes From the Middle of Nowhere," 12 Apr. 2018
The space agency will launch a Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility on the Delmarva Peninsula that will deploy colorful vapor tracers.

— jason daley, Smithsonian, "NASA Launch Will Dot the Sky With Colorful Clouds," 29 June 2017
Working in the New Mexico desert, the scientists launched a sounding rocket called FOXSI containing seven telescopes on a 15-minute trip into space to observe the sun (shown above in x-ray light).

— katherine kornei, Science | AAAS, "Explosions on the sun’s surface explain its extremely hot outermost layers," 9 Oct. 2017
The sounding rocket program fills the gap between regions of the atmosphere that are too low for satellites to sample but too high for conventional aircraft to reach.

— jason daley, Smithsonian, "NASA Launch Will Dot the Sky With Colorful Clouds," 29 June 2017
In January, German researchers produced an exotic state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate by launching cold atoms on a sounding rocket from Sweden.

— edwin cartlidge, Science | AAAS, "China’s atomic clock passes space test," 20 Sep. 2017

These 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.