Johns Hopkins team prepares to launch $3.2M, 1,110-pound NASA sounding rocket [VIDEO]

For six years, a team of students, electricians and machinists led by astrophysicist Stephan McCandliss have been assembling a $3.2 million rocket in a basement laboratory on the Johns Hopkins Unversity‘s Homewood campus, according to the Hopkins’ Gazette.
Now it’s going to launch.

Called the Far-ultraviolet Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy, this 24-foot-tall NASA sounding rocket, weighing in at 1,110 pounds, will go airborne this fall, reports the Gazette.

Over the last six years, they have sweated over the placement of each component, screw, and wire on this new kind of spectro-telescope, which will be launched on a trajectory 180 miles into the sky later this fall from White Sands Missile Range in the desert of New Mexico on a mission to wrest secrets from the universe. Specifically, the team hopes to determine how ultraviolet light emitted by hydrogen—referred to as the “Lyman alpha line” in honor of its 1906 discovery by Theodore Lyman—manages its great escape from the dusty confines of star-forming galaxies. [more]

Watch a video of the crew at work:
http://www.youtube.com/v/30DMuPRegio?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0