A few of us traveled to the National Pike Park launch site on Wednesday, December 26, 2007.  It was a cold dreary day, but the winds were light and there were no people around. 

Objectives:

• User the new altimeter, version 2.
• Try the timer ejection system along with the crimson ejection charge.
• Get more altimeter data from the Team 2 V2 rocket.
• Try the 36inch X-chute on the V2.

To launch the timer and ejection system, we used an old rocket from last year and an E9-8 engine.  The E9 had it's own ejection charge which would go off at around 8 seconds after burnout.  We tried it twice, once without the timer to get a base line and then with the timer.  We launched with a 60gram wooden egg in the nose cone. We had issues with both launches.

The V2 launch was very nice.  We angled the launch tower a little.

Lessons

• The 8 second delay was too long for the low flying first Fatboy flight.  The chute opened about 50 feet from the ground.  We switched to a 6 second delay for the second flight.
• On the second Fatboy flight, the crimson ejection charge came out of the socket and did not fire. We need to clip it in some how.
• On the second Fatboy flight, the nose cone broke off the shock cord and descended with out a chute.  The chute should be connected to the cargo unit, not the shock cord.
• Even though the wind was light, we need to angle the launch towers with the wind -- one degree for each mile per hour of the wind.
• While the Fatboy flights were very different, they were similar for the first 4 seconds, which gives us hope for deploying the chute before apogee.
• Try to use the same altimeter on all flights of a specific rocket.
• Bring the scale to weigh the rocket and ejection charge (crimson powder).
• You need to dress for the weather -- boots, coats, hoods, gloves.

 Launches

We mapped the two altimeter data sets to the timer launch from earlier to get this excel file.