The primary goal of the Alaska Student Rocket Project (SRPII) is to provide opportunities for students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) to become involved in the design, construction, and launch of sounding rocket payloads. The student-designed payloads are launched from the nearby Poker Flat Research Range, which is the only university-operated sounding rocket range in the world. A secondary goal is to enhance the infrastructure and capabilities at UAF for developing scientific payloads for sounding rockets and spacecraft.

The second payload of the Student Rocket Project (SRPII) is designed to test the feasibility of tracking sounding rockets in real-time using the Global Positioning System (GPS) and low cost GPS receivers. A differential GPS technique will be used in which the coordinates from a GPS receiver on board the rocket will be transmitted to the ground and compared with the coordinates from a fixed GPS receiver with known location. This differential GPS technique will provide tracking accuracy to less than 3 meters in the horizontal plane, and less than 10 meters in the vertical dimension.

The SRPII payload includes the following capabilities that are advances beyond the those of the SRP-1 payload:

On-board GPS receiver

The success of the SRPII payload will be measured by its ability to accomplish the following objectives:
 

Measurement of rocket performance, including acceleration, vibration, pressure (altitude), and nose-tip temperature throughout flight

Verification of new student-designed recovery system

Verification of new student-designed separation mechanism