Parachutes

After a short break last week to catch up on non-rocket related projects we are back in full swing again.

We ordered some great lightweight ripstop nylon parachute material from the UK this week. It was comparatively cheap at only AUD$32 delivered for 10m x 1m of the stuff. It is a nice orange that should make it easily visible. From the time of order to delivery it only took about 6 days to get here which is pretty fast considering it had to go half way round the world.

We want to make a new lighter parachute to replace the one on the Polaron rocket. The parachute will weigh less than half the weight of the existing one, and also use up about half the space. For the shroud lines we are going to use TigerTail - a very strong light-weight line typically used for making necklaces. It is stranded stainless steel cable coated with nylon. It is very light, doesn't kink, is only 0.3mm thick and has very high tensile strength. This will allow us to make a strong parachute and should pack into a much smaller space.

If this parachute goes well, we will most likely make up more parachutes for the other rockets, including Acceleron.

We have also been doing some more work on flight computer V1.5 and hopefully the prototype should be ready soon. We are getting a number of PCB boards made up so it will take up minimal space and weight. Once finished it will be used on all of our rockets as it is capable of driving two separate servos and has a few more nice features compared to the previous version.

I turned off comments here on blogger (temporarily) due to excessive amount of SPAM last week, so if you would like to ask questions, just visit the main site and go to the contact page.
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