La Courtine 2008
|
This campaign ran from July 27 to August 3, and has been a prolific year for me. Indeed, I had 3 projects in addition to being "supporter" of my home club CLES-FACIL. The Courtine camp is located in central France west of Clermont-Ferrand.
|
The CLES-FACIL
launched a magnificent rocket called Leďa which dropped a Cansat called R2D2. The flight was perfect and the Cansat was ejected, unfortunately the parachute door got stuck when opening and the parachute could not come out.
Here is Leďa before during the checks:
|
|
| On the ramp |
|
|
Leďa before the launch with the team |
|
Leia - Take off
|
Exploradur Project
I participated (weakly) in this Cansat project, the aim of which was above all to promote the Cansats towards rocket clubs. It was supposed to represent a space probe sent to an unknown planet from which we wanted to obtain a minimum of information to be able to send a more sophisticated probe. It was therefore a question of lowering this probe by parachute and once on the ground, releasing the parachute and transmitting information on the main environmental characteristics of this new planet: temperature, pressure, hardness of the ground then in a second step, deployment of solar panels, bidirectional remote control / telemetry link and finally shooting.
|
The release went perfectly and the parachute detached as planned at 1.5m from the ground. The 2.4 GHz radio link on the ground could not be made due to the fact that the cansat landed behind a small hill thus preventing any connection. However, after recovery of the machine, the data could be recovered. Overall a great success.
|
|
Below: the machine itself, with its deployed solar panels, its 2.4GHz transmitter / receiver and the batteries in green. Then this same machine after its release from the captive balloon.
|
REVA 2
The REVA project launched in 2007 at La Courtine, had a nominal flight, but the measures had not worked satisfactorily, in particular we did not know if the opening of the parachute had been controlled by the aerodynamic flap or by the security timer.
The REVA2 project therefore aimed to obtain good measurements and in addition to filming the flight.
|
Here are some views of REVA2 showing the interior and exterior appearance :
|
|
Complete, but door open to see the parachute.
|
|
Ready for the flight. Note the elastic retaining the door which will only be removed after placing on the ramp
|
|
Lift-off ! we can see the shutter quite open. At this moment, the exit of the ramp has released this shutter and the speed is just high enough to keep it sufficiently closed.
|
|
A little higher, and there the shutter is pressed against the rocket.
|
|
On landing the pitot tube and the cone took a little hit, as well as the 2 ailerons on the ground, but nothing too serious. The telemetry worked perfectly, unfortunately the camera stopped filming before takeoff.
|
|
Result of the altitude measurement. The measurements stopped at 23.5 s, the memory being full.
|
|
The speed curve, we see that the descent under parachute was done at about 10m / s what was expected. The oscillations around 10 m / s being due to the rocket swaying at the end of its parachute, which greatly disturbed the pressure measurements.
|
|
This curve shows that at the start, on the ramp, the opening angle was 20 ° and that it took 1s for it to press against the rocket, which corresponds to the maximum speed.
|
The shutter opened to approximately 41 ° after 6.3s. The emergency timer being set to 7s, it is indeed the shutter that allowed the opening of the parachute.
Hippie
Hippie is a water rocket made from a polycarbonate tube 60mm in
diameter and 1.2mm thick. The purpose of this rocket was to test the
high pressure water rocket launcher, the pressure expected for Hippie
was 15 bars.
|
We see here the payload, that is to say the electronics for controlling the opening of the parachute and for measuring altitude. just below, the parachute (in red) and its ejection system: a yellow balloon. 
|
|
Preliminary tests of the launch pad (possible leaks, resistance to jaws, etc ...) 
|
|
Ramp descent 
|
|
The ramp in place 
|
|
The whole project team around the ramp topped with the rocket 
|
|
The trigonometric gun with its camera is ready.. 
|
|
Take-off  |
|
Painful return to earth! The acceleration sensor supposed to detect takeoff did not work, so the timer did not start. The camera's SD card was damaged and we could not extract the video. 
|
|
The equipment box, in bad shape. 
|
