sounding rocket

noun

1. a rocket equipped with instruments for making meteorological observations in the upper atmosphere.

Word History and Origins

Origin of sounding rocket¹

First recorded in 1940–45

Example Sentences

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

Read more on Science Daily

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

Read more on Washington Post

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

Read more on BBC

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.

Read more on Scientific American

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.

Read more on Science Magazine