The 4th flight of Cindy Loo Hoo
Monday 16 November 2009 - Filed under Rockets + Uncategorized
On Sunday we had the last Tripoli Minnesota launch of the year. It was a beautiful day and we successfully launched and retrieved our rocket. Nice to have no new failures to report.
To the right you see a frame grab of the launch and the altitude and velocity plots from the PerfectFlite MAWD altimeter. It hit 7292 feet (2222m) and 650 mph (291 m/s). It went out of site on launch so we didn’t witness the parachute coming out, even with the binoculars. But once it got low enough I could see that everything had deployed correctly. It landed about a half mile away in a field owned by a very unpleasant man. I won’t get into that story…
The data matches the simulator from RockSim very well. It went about 10% lower than predicted, but that makes sense. I use a few O-rings and tape and things that mar the perfect surface that RockSim calculates with. The velocity plot matches surprisingly well. The altimeter doesn’t measure velocity so you have to compute it numerically using the time and altitude. That is why the data looks noisy.
The descent velocity was about 35 mph, which is a tad faster than they normally recommend, but this rocket is all G10 fiberglass and pretty hard to damage. Everything was in great shape when I got it back.
Here’s the (short) video of the launch:
It was a nice launch season but too short! Now it’s time to build some stuff for next year…
2009-11-16 » lolife