Students in the aerospace curriculum at UMD benefit tremendously from opportunities for hands-on experience with real engineering. This adds to their education, inspires and justifies the content of many of their courses with real-world applications, improves their skill set and experience, makes them better engineers, and ultimately helps with obtaining internships and full-time employment. The RockSat program is run by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium specifically to inspire more students to participate and to become more capable aerospace engineers.

The 2018 UMD RockSat-X payload consists of two separate experiments. The first, called STAR, builds on the 2017 RockSat-X experiment in collaboration with CapTech, and aims to validate models of triboelectric charging of dielectric dust grains, an important process in the regolith on the surface of small, airless planetary bodies. The second, called SCAMP, investigates the variation in performance of a robotic actuator between laboratory and flight conditions, in particular, the effect of microgravity on precision and bandwidth of actuator motions.