![]() This site was designated the Pilotless Aircraft Research Station and conducted high-speed aerodynamic research to supplement wind tunnel and laboratory investigations into the problems of flight. In 1945, NASA's predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), established a rocket launch site on Wallops Island under the direction of the Langley Research Center. Navy personnel, and about 100 employees of NOAA. Workers at Wallops include approximately 1,000 full-time NASA civil service employees and the employees of contractors, about 30 U.S. The WFF mobile range assets have been used to support rocket launches from locations in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, South America, Africa, Europe, Australia, and at sea. In addition to its fixed-location instrumentation assets, the WFF range includes mobile radar, telemetry receivers, and command transmitters that can be transported by cargo planes to locations around the world, in order to establish a temporary range where no other instrumentation exists, to ensure safety, and to collect data in order to enable and support suborbital rocket launches from remote sites. ![]() Wallops also supports development tests and exercises involving United States Navy aircraft and ship-based electronics and weapon systems in the Virginia Capes operating area, near the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. The Wallops Flight Facility also supports science missions for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and occasionally for foreign governments and commercial organizations. The launch vehicles vary in size and power from the small Super Loki meteorological rockets to orbital-class vehicles. There have been over 16,000 launches from the rocket testing range at Wallops since its founding in 1945 in the quest for information on the flight characteristics of airplanes, launch vehicles, and spacecraft, and to increase the knowledge of the Earth's upper atmosphere and the environment of outer space. WFF includes an extensively instrumented range to support launches of more than a dozen types of sounding rockets small expendable suborbital and orbital rockets high-altitude balloon flights carrying scientific instruments for atmospheric and astronomical research and, using its Research Airport, flight tests of aeronautical research aircraft, including unmanned aerial vehicles. The facility is operated by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and primarily serves to support science and exploration missions for NASA and other Federal agencies. ![]() Wallops Flight Facility ( WFF) ( IATA: WAL, ICAO: KWAL, FAA LID: WAL) is a rocket launch site on Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, United States, just east of the Delmarva Peninsula and approximately 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Norfolk. ![]() “This will continue the history of the program using excess rockets for affordable scientific research.Wallops Flight Facility with its three separate parcels of property “The use of the nine-foot tall Orion motor, a surplus military rocket, looks feasible to meet the requirements,” said Giovanni Rosanova, NASA’s Sounding Rockets Program Office chief. Both rockets are projected to carry their payloads to about 71 miles altitude, where they will test aerodynamic stability and performance of both the launch vehicle and payload designs. One payload has a four-inch diameter and is 71 inches long while the other has a nine-inch diameter and is 83 inches long. The upcoming launches will use one of the smaller rockets in NASA’s fleet to carry newly-designed compact payloads into the mesosphere. These rockets and their payloads should also be relatively small to ensure the area being investigated is minimally disrupted during the experiment. To study the mesosphere thoroughly, there is a need for relatively inexpensive rockets that can be launched in quick succession over the course of several hours, including simultaneous launches along different angles to provide spatial coverage.
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