This blog covers the day to day progress of water rocket development by the Air Command Water Rockets team. It is also a facility for people to provide feedback and ask questions.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Gravity Mechanisms

We had a great launch weekend last week with beautiful weather conditions. We also finally flew an experiment that we've been wanting to do for a while.

One of the things that we see quite often are designs for parachute deployment systems based on "gravity" mechanisms that attempt to detect apogee when the rocket tips over.

So we flew a couple of experiments that show what actually happens to these mechanisms in flight:


The full write up of the experiment is here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day136.htm

This includes photos and a highlights video from the whole day. We also had a go at using the 240fps mode on the GoPro which turned out quite well. We're not quite game yet to put the GoPro on a rocket. We could probably protect it from impact, but the real danger is getting it stuck up in a tree.

We are going to fly a few more mechanisms in the coming weeks to demonstrate how they behave.