How to Use sounding rocket in a Sentence

sounding rocket

noun
  • Of course, the trade-off is that sounding rockets have a brief mission life.
    — Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Traveling at a moment’s notice is a sounding rocket badge of honor.
    — Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Dutch sounding rocket launches from Canada.
    — Eric Berger, ArsTechnica, 12 June 2026
  • Interstellar has launched a handful of sounding rockets but hasn't yet built an orbital launcher.
    — ArsTechnica, 18 June 2025
  • The suborbital launch on a Black Brant sounding rocket reached an apogee of 243 km.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 8 July 2022
  • The answer lay in its UV spectrum, which is difficult to capture from a sounding rocket.
    — Daniel Clery, Science | AAAS, 18 July 2019
  • Until now, Andøya Spaceport has been used for launches of suborbital sounding rockets.
    — Ars Technica, 23 Mar. 2025
  • The sounding rocket program fills the gap between regions of the atmosphere that are too low for satellites to sample but too high for conventional aircraft to reach.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 29 June 2017
  • There have been times when upwards of 30 suborbital sounding rockets have launched from the same site within the same day, says McDowell.
    — Loren Grush, The Verge, 18 Dec. 2018
  • Back in 1988, bull sperm was put into sounding rockets and blasted into the air to see how the sperm would react in microgravity.
    — Elly Belle, Teen Vogue, 17 July 2018
  • At the time, one of the co-founders, Daniel Metzler, led a team of 40 students working on rocket engines and launching sounding rockets.
    — Ars Technica, 23 Mar. 2025
  • And in the burgeoning private spaceflight industry, entrepreneurs can use existing sounding rocket infrastructure to get a sense of what their own startup could turn out to be.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 8 Nov. 2019
  • Sensors placed on sounding rockets make occasional measurements of the region, but most of the processes taking place there are little understood.
    — Tereza Pultarova, Space.com, 16 Aug. 2025
  • Special craft called sounding rockets, which are comparatively cost-effective to launch, give researchers a chance to study inside zero-gravity environments for a few minutes at a time.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 8 Nov. 2019
  • The space agency blasted three sounding rockets above central and northern Alaska during an auroral substorm to study how these substorms impact the Earth's atmosphere.
    — Michael D'estries, Travel + Leisure, 7 Apr. 2025
  • Esrange has been the departure point for numerous suborbital and sounding rocket for nearly 50 years, but the spaceport is being upgraded for orbital satellite launches.
    — Stephen Clark, Ars Technica, 28 June 2024
  • The next phase of the program could involve mounting the experimental aircraft onto a sounding rocket or similar launch vehicle for a real-world Mach 5 flight demonstration.
    — Atharva Gosavi, Interesting Engineering, 19 May 2026
  • In the 80 years since the war, German industry developed a handful of small sounding rockets, and manufactured upper stages for Ariane rockets.
    — Ars Technica, 23 Mar. 2025
  • The sounding rocket campaign’s aim is to determine whether the high-radiation environment around nearby sunlike stars would strip any potentially earthlike planets of their atmospheres on timescales of only a few million years.
    — Bruce Dorminey, Forbes, 14 May 2022
  • The sounding rocket’s flight was a major success, reaching an altitude of 90km and validating a lot of what Skyroot had planned for its larger orbital vehicle, Vikram-1.
    — Eric Berger, ArsTechnica, 11 May 2026
  • In October 1945 at White Sands, a yellow and black sounding rocket called the WAC-Corporal roared from a launch pad.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 Feb. 2016
  • The new program will not eliminate DOD flight tests, but the simple, two-stage sounding rockets built from surplus inventory motors should cost considerably less than military tests, which can cost tens of millions of dollars to fly.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 26 Oct. 2018
  • Conditions on Mars are far colder, and the ascent vehicle’s exposure time will be far longer than, say, sounding rockets launched into Earth’s aurora borealis from inside the Arctic Circle.
    — Robin George Andrews, Scientific American, 6 Feb. 2020
  • The program was created to launch inexpensive sounding rockets carrying scientific experiments and prototypes of missile technology.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 26 Oct. 2018
  • The sounding rockets released vapor tracers and pressure sensors at different heights across central and northern Alaska during a sudden auroral substorm, which is a sudden, brief, and explosive intensification, or brightening, of an aurora.
    — Samantha Mathewson, Space.com, 31 Mar. 2025
  • The missions saw two suborbital sounding rockets launch from the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska loaded with scientific equipment that will fly into the atmosphere for a short period of time to gather data.
    — Julian Dossett, Space.com, 15 Feb. 2026
  • The suborbital research rockets, known as sounding rockets, will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.
    — Denise Chow, NBC news, 25 Aug. 2025
  • The project, which used a Dornier Alpha Jet aircraft and a HAX25 sounding rocket developed by an Italian company named T4i, was initiated to support Italy’s push to develop a more responsive launch capability.
    — Stephen Clark, ArsTechnica, 15 May 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'sounding rocket.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: