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The Passive Sounding Rocket |
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During one of my brainstorming sessions (which were far too prevalent
at the beginning of high school), I realized
that
it would be a good idea to have a means of finding out the wind
conditions
above the launch site before the launch of a big rocket. I had
tried
using a balloon before, but regular helium balloons have very little
lifting
capacity, as they get weighed down by their own strings if they
go too high. But, what about some sort of sounding rocket? I realized that a light enough rocket could pass through areas of different wind speeds, get blown around, and be observed from the ground. This would classify as a "passive sounding rocket," unlike most sounding rockets, like the Aerobees, which actively take meausurements by means of their instruments. I drew up a list of requirements. This passive sounding rocket would have to be:
For the engineering tradeoffs, I chose the first,
second,
third, fifth, and sixth requirements as the most important. I sketched up a cutaway view of the rocket. It ended up looking a lot like the Estes Mosquito, having a "fly it and lose it" reputation. Satisfied with the design, I set about naming this rocket. I decided that I wanted to indirectly name it after a sounding rocket. The first sounding rocket that came to mind that meausured wind in the atmosphere was Arcas. At the time having little knowledge of mythology (although it would later become a personal fascination), I searched various places online to find some mythological story about Arcas, so I could name my rocket after the equivalent from another culture. I found one site that gave the story that someone (probably Zeus) got mad at Arcas, and banished him to the sky, where he became the star Arcturus. That actually isn't how the story goes, but I didn't know that at the time. I thus declared Arcturus a perfect name. On November 7, 2001, the first anniversary of the formation of the WAEC, I drafted plans for Arcturus. I concisely described the purpose and function of the rocket on the side of the plans as: This rocket is designed as a passive sounding rocket, intended to take "soundings" of the atmosphere by simply flying through it, and not taking active meausurements.Building the first Arcturus prototype wasn't very hard. It just invloved carving a little block of balsa into a nose cone, cutting a tube, and gluing fins onto the tube. The construction suffered a major setback when I realized that I had no launch lugs, and had to order them from Aerospace Specialty Products. After painting the body and nose orange and painting the fins black, along with a stripe down the side, I was ready to launch the little guy. I went out to the WAEC Space Harbor on the morning of December 10, 2000, with high hopes of a successful launch. But, all three of my launchers failed, for one reason or another. No rockets of mine flew that day. It took until New Year's Eve, 2000, for the first Arcturus prototype to actually fly. By then I had realized a terrible design flaw: the rocket was far too tiny to be easily tracked by the eye. The entire point of the rocket was to be easily tracked to sound for winds. But now I wouldn't be able to see it! I launched it anyway, just for the sake of saying that it had flow successfully. On December 31st, a bitingly (if that's a word) cold day, I finally flew Arcturus Mk. 1. It screamed off the pad on a tiny 1/4A3-4T and disappeared into the blue. After quite some time trudging around the field looking for it, I gave up and decided to go back to the launch pad. Lucky for me, I nearly stepped on the way back Arcturus, but noticed it in time and avoided smashing it. After the first test flight, I retired the Arcturus Mk. 1 prototype, since it didn't perform in the way I intended. I considered converting it to fly on Micro-Maxx engines, but I never got around to it. I knew that I would never fly it on any engine made by Estes: they were all too powerful. For a while, I kicked around the idea of an Arcturus Mk. 2. It would have to be slightly bigger, heavier, and more draggy than its predecessor, so that it would fly more slowly. Had it been built, Arcturus Mk. 2 would probably have been a "paperoc," a rocket made almost entirely of heavy paper (like the Centuri Two-Bitz). The paperoc would have been more complex, but wouldn't cost very much more than the paper on which its patterns were printed. I also considered adapting an existing rocket (perhaps Leviathan) with a ram smoke emitter to make Arcturus Smoke. Doing such a thing would have been downright foolish after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Disappointingly, my ideas never made it past the planning stages, and the WAEC never got a passive sounding rocket. Specifications
Length: 10 cm Body Tube: BT-5 Engine Mount: 13 mm Nose Shape: Parabolic Recovery: Featherweight Fin Shape: Parallelogram Number of Flights: 1 |
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herein copyright 2000-2008
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
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