Canon EOS 5D Mark II
ƒ/7.1
400 mm
1/3,200
400
A joyful sight!
This is very hard to pull off in supersonic flight at high altitudes where the air is thin.
4 responses to “Successful Staging – Flight 2”
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The staging start with Separation. This photo was 2 seconds before the one above. The booster chutes deploy prematurely, shredding them into sky confetti. The sustainer soars freely upward:
The on-board flight computers in the upper stage detect burnout of the booster and light the forward igniter in the sustainer motor (main photo on top).Sustainer sidewall burn-through (4 seconds after sustainer ignition):
Mavericks is analyzing the flight data and photos to further understand the flight progression.
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We are still analyzing flight data, but it appears that the 2nd stage motor section separated from the payload section and nose cone which continued on its flight trajectory. You can see a smudge of it on the upper portion of this photo above continuing on its flight path. The payload section and 2nd stage motor booster had separate recovery systems on them and were not tethered with a shock cord like most hobby rockets. The conclusion of the motor burn as the motor depressurized created the thrust anomaly in your prior photo due to a liner burn through, but this was after payload drag separation. The recovery system on the 2nd stage motor clearly suffered from the supersonic inflation which it was not designed for, but we are still looking at exactly what happened there.
On the booster, the shear pins holding the recovery plate in place, melted due to mach heating, once the 2nd stage separated and exposed the booster from the protection of the mach shock envelope. That plate was attached to the drogue, which was attached to the main, which all got sucked into the supersonic airflow, resulting in a prematyure supersonic chute inflation, which it was not designed for. Funny how 6 cents worth of plastic screws could create all that damage. Clearly we need to look at the retention in this aspect of the design for future flights.
It is premature to draw any conclusions on the flight profile at this time, as we are still gathering data and analyzing and putting together the complete flight sequence. Our debrief will take place this coming weekend, and we will have more conclusive data and details of the complete flight profile at that time, after we can compare avionics data, accelerometer data, and barometric data, and telemetry data.
All in all, the flight looked good, but the motor recovery was a little rougher than we would have liked. For the first full up flight of the combined system, we are very pleased with the results. Clearly we need to make some allocations for supersonic deployment in the recovery systems, which we did not anticipate and maybe use a brass screw to retain the recovery system plates to handle the mach heating which was more intense than we anticipated.
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