In December, Nassau announced it's sending a second Artemus rocket into space, aiding in its mission.

Researchers at the University of Kentucky, they've been working to improve the durability of the rockets heat shields.

But this isn't a new mission for students and professors at UC's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

We've been working with Nassau on Heat Shield for about 14 years now at the university, so we've always been very involved into analyzing, simulating modeling, heat shield, testing.

They're testing new concepts and trying to get better heat shield.

Heat shields, provide protection for capsules coming back from space.

And there's two different types of heat shields.

There are ones that don't damage when they come in.

So think about like a space shuttle tile that can be reused.

And then there are ablative heat shields, which are the ones that we're looking at.

Ablative heat shields have a material in them that form gases as they heat up and those gases push back out.

And that provides some additional protection so they can provide protection for higher temperatures and therefore higher velocity spacecraft.

For this one, there was an issue with cracking.

And so we were asked to look at those materials to try to provide data that could help them understand what was causing that issue.

So we look at these materials in their original form and then after they've been used and the gases have have been burned out of them in their final form, we look at them at various stages.

And so in my experimental rig, we take small pieces of the material and we seal it and push gases through it and look at what pressures are required to get gas to flow through through the material.

So when gases are formed in these during the ablation process, the gas has to get out and that can build up a lot of pressure and lead to cracking.

And so it's that pressure build up that we're primarily interested in measuring.

I've been doing this as a faculty for five years, but in my graduate work I was working on heat shields as well.

So being in this heat shield modeling slash experiments for over 15 years now, and so my work involved imaging.

So we use these really powerful microscopes to get a full picture of how the the material looks like locally.

And once we understand how it looks, we can kind of try to explain why it's behaving the way it's behaving.

Big part of it for our faculty is mentorship and workforce development.

So, you know, you're preparing your students to go out there in the workforce and compete with, you know, the best in the world, Right?

And what's been really nice with these partnerships is that they go for internships and then it translates into a job even before you know, they're graduating.

The crewed mission is set for April 20, 26.

NASA is planning a third art, a mass flight in 2027.