A group of aspiring engineers and scientists studying at University of Hawaii community colleges will head to Virginia on Sunday to participate in a second NASA-funded rocket launch.

Sixteen students from Honolulu, Windward, Kapiolani and Kauai community colleges have been designing and building a small experiment package, or payload, for launch into space, over the past year as part of Project Imua.

The student-designed payload contains six different experiments and is outfitted with five microcomputers — ranging from the size of a credit card to the size of a stick of gum — and tiny cameras capable of capturing images and video and sending them back to Earth over a wireless internet connection.

The project, which includes parts made with a 3-D printer, had to meet specific size and weight requirements: exactly 15 pounds, 6 inches high and within the 14-inch diameter of the NASA rocket. It also had to be designed to withstand extreme temperatures, vibration and moisture.

The payload will be placed inside a rocket measuring four stories high that will be launched Aug. 16 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Hawaii’s unit will be sent approximately 100 miles up into space before being deployed along with payloads designed by students from mainland universities.

The student experiments will be in flight for a little more than five minutes before they start to coast back to Earth and land in the Atlantic Ocean, where they will be collected by a NASA vessel and returned to Wallops. On the way down the payloads will be exposed to blazing-hot temperatures and moisture from the ocean, so prior to the launch students were required to complete multiple durability tests.

The students gathered this week at Windward Community College to run final simulation tests.

“We have to prove to NASA that our payload has already done the mission in a simulated way,” said project manager Joe Ciotti, a professor of physics, astronomy and mathematics at Windward Community College.

One of the experiments onboard the Project Imua payload is a neutron detector designed by Kauai Community College students. Neutrons, like electrons and protons, are particles that make up most atoms.

“The neutron is not a charged particle like an electron or a proton, so it actually requires a physical interaction in order to detect it; we can’t detect it magnetically or electrically,” said Kauai Community College student Nick Herrmann.

The students built a device that will emit a light pulse when it’s struck by a neutron. That device incorporates what’s known as a PMT, or photo multiplier tube, that will take the light pulse and transmit it into an electrical signal that the students can then measure, Herrmann said. “This is the first time that a micro-PMT will be used in space,” he added.

Other student-designed experiments on the payload include a small sublimation-powered rocket that will use mothballs as its fuel (sublimation is the transition of a substance from a solid directly into a gas); a nine-axis motion detector; and tiny battery-powered cameras to record video and pictures.

The multicampus project is funded by a two-year $500,000 grant awarded to the Hawaii NASA Space Grant Consortium by the NASA Space Grant Competitive Opportunity for Partnerships With Community Colleges and Technical Schools. It includes stipends for students.

“You can see by listening to these students, the project is to help them develop STEM experience, and this is phenomenal project- based, hands-on experience for them,” Ciotti said, referring to the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

“These are community college students doing graduate student-level projects,” added William Smith, one of the faculty mentors for the project.

Last August, UH students successfully launched a payload into space with a single experiment aimed at collecting and analyzing information about the sun’s ultraviolet rays. This year’s payload is called PrIME, an acronym for Project Imua Multiple Experiment.