Recovery
Meet Our Recovery Team!
Tanner Ross was the leader of recovery and worked closely with Isaac Deavenport to build the single parachute system.
Parachute
A 7ft, 2.2 CD parachute allows an efficient descent for the 118 lb rocket, hitting the ground at a swift 36 ft/s, while reducing the opening force with its smaller diameter.
Parachute Placement
The parachute is placed just behind payload in the nose cone and just above avionics in the fiberglass forebody. Space was a concern, so a generous packing volume was allocated, able to be reduced later on.
Black Powder
The separation of the nose cone can be accomplished by increasing the pressure in the tube where the parachute is placed. Redundant charges were placed in order to ensure a complete separation.
Venting
The difference in pressure between the ground and 50,000 ft creates a large force on the nosecone, possibly prematurely separating the nosecone. To equalize the pressure, we need to create small vent holes in the body tube.
Shear Pins
To prevent this premature separation, even with venting, shear pins will be used that will break when the black powder deploys, further preventing premature separation with the loose friction fit of the nose cone.
Drift
White Sands doesn't technically have a drift range, but we need to be within a twenty mile radius for our GPS to detect it. Drift is a doubly important calculation because we are not using drogue deployment - the rocket will descend under a main chute for the duration of the flight. To mitigate that, we are using a main that just barely slows our rocket to ~50 ft/s. Assuming 50,000 feet, we land after 1000 seconds. Unfortunately, the wind is very difficult to predict - the best source for WSMR is a spreadsheet that SystemsGo provides - but we can assume worst case: wind speed of 12 m/s, which gives a landing distance of only 7.5 miles. Drift isn't that hard.
