Northwest Indian College Space Center First Nations Launch 4/29/10 – 5/2/10

Northwest Indian College Space Center I would like to introduce you to the NWIC Space Center. We as a group have learned so much in the past four months about building rockets, both high powered and bottle rockets. We would like to gather data and examine how high it travels, the way the rocket spins and the effect those have on a rocket. What can be learned from measuring and analyzing roll and vibration during a rocket’s flight? We are figuring out the drag, thrust, lift and weight to the rockets and seeing how that affects a rockets travel and what we can do to improve it. We will be presenting two Hi Tech H45 rockets and see how they compare and contrast mainly looking at roll and vibration. Everything has an effect whether it is the paint job, electronics, recovery system and the weather. These are our general experiments, we are rather new compared to many but we will achieve our goal attaining our knowledge we need to gain so that the next time we enter a launch situation, we can be polished and prepared.

Electronics  Altimeter – height, velocity, acceleration  Digital video camera  Data storage  Vibration detection and quantifying  Roll detection and quantifying using variation in light Each of these are tools used to measure and capture the different aspects and scientific viewpoints of rocketry. Just another way to learn about our rocket. Light Detector Video Camera Microcontroller

Altimeter The R-DAS Tiny altimeter is a tool that measures and stores data as the rockets increases its altitude. It also measures and stores speed and acceleration. R-DAS Tiny Mounted upside down to create more usable space.

Digital Video Camera  This helps us with viewing what we can do to improve our flights.  Shoots 1 hour of video with a 4 gb Micro SD Card  3 x 1 x ½ in size Video Camera

Electronic Experiments  Temperature – how hot are the gases that eject the parachute?  Roll – does the rocket roll and if so how much?  Vibration – how much vibration is there during a rockets flight?

Payload & Extra  What can be learned from measuring and analyzing roll and vibration during a rocket’s flight? We will be presenting two Hi Tech H45 rockets and see how they compare and contrast. Everything has an effect whether it is the paint job, electronics, recovery system and the weather.  Our experiment is we are going to measure roll. Roll being the rotation of the rocket along it long axis while it is in the air. We measure roll with TSL230R. (Texas Advanced Optoelectronics Solutions)  TSL230R Measures light to Frequency. Meaning that when the H45 Spins it measures light frequency differences as the rocket rotates.  Vibration we will measure the vibration on the rockets and see how that effects how high the H45’s will travel.

Recovery System

Building a Recovery System  First you glue the shock-cord to the rocket body when you aren’t using a piston. When the shock-cord is successfully glued and dried proceed with installation of the flame resistant blanket. When the flame retardant blanket is secured to the shock-cord, tie the two ends of the shock-cord together, the Kevlar and Ripstop.  Neatly but securely begin looping or placing half the shock-cord within the rockets body because you have to create a loop in the middle of the shock-cord which is where you attach the parachute. After the loop is made, tie or loop the parachute onto the loop created from the previous step. Then you fold it up properly and stick it in the rocket and that is the recovery system.

Shock Cord Click to Start

Harness  Shock cord: tubular nylon and Kevlar.  Parachute: Ripstop Nylon. The parachute cords are also called shroud lines/paracord.  Some of the rockets involve pistons and others live without. A piston protects the parachute from the hot deployment gases and pushes out the parachute and the rockets without pistons have to protect the parachute from the hot deployment gases with a flame retardant blanket.

Folding the Parachute

Typical Non-Piston Parachute Setup For the Hi Tech H-45 the Kevlar is attached to the fin can and then the nylon is attached to the Kevlar. The shock cord is then attached to the parachute and the shock cord is also attached to the nose cone.

Typical Piston Recovery System For a model like the Tomahawk, the shock cords attached to the piston then attached to more shock cord then its attached to the parachute then to the nose cone. Piston

THE END NWIC SC Team Members Maria Williams Kyle Koos Talia Graves Michael Wright