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Malaspina engages in international and generationally diverse research teams, including a team building a sounding rocket to explore the interface between Earth and space.

It turned out to be a sounding rocket launched from Wallops Island, Va., as part of research for Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

The sounding rocket's tenure in space was similarly short - the 13m-long projectile fell back to Earth after a planned 15 minutes.

In Nature Communications this past February, they published the results of a 2017 experiment that manufactured BECs on a millimeter-sized chip in a suborbital sounding rocket almost 300 kilometers above the planet’s surface.

A sounding rocket will fly into the ionosphere—an atmospheric layer hundreds of kilometers up that’s awash in ions and electrons—and eject 1.5 kilograms of barium atoms.