A team of Canterbury University students are coming back to earth after competing in the Spaceport America Cup.
It's the world’s largest student rocket engineering conference and competition, with more than 150 teams taking part from 24 countries.
The UC students won their category and were third overall in the competition.
The challenge in their category was to most closely achieve a controlled rocket flight, to a height of 30,000 feet.
Travelling at a speed of mach 2.1, the rocket got within 25 feet of the 10km target height, and that was enough to secure a win for the Kiwi team.
To ensure their rocket hit the mark, the students employed some basic but unique technology – airbrakes.
“They were a three petal design that deployed out of the rocket and they could change the drag, and by changing the drag, we could change how high the rocket would go.” says Henry Eden-Mann, rocket’s Avionics & Control Systems lead for the UC Aerospace team.
Eden-Mann says that once the rocket takes off it’s completely autonomous.
The rocket’s software uses sensors on the rocket’s exterior to measure its air pressure and acceleration, determining the right time to deploy the air brakes.
By John Spurdle
Public Interest Journalism Fund
