These are the GPS coordinates of our supersonic N2801 flight and Google Earth carries the ghost image of Black Rock City 2011.

The GPS feed caught the drive of the rocket out to the pad, then it lost GPS lock while going supersonic, and then reacquired satellite lock at apogee. This was the data that streamed own in real time by the on-board Balloon Boy. It missed the apogee event on this flight, but started streaming again on the way down, at 22,933 feet above ground level.

The on-board computer log is below. Zero to 1,164 MPH in 3.9 seconds.

11 responses to “Blasting over Burning Man”

  1. From the blue altitude curve, you can clearly see that the airframe separated at apogee as programmed, and it is a bit of a rough tumble, but then the yank of the cord separated the nose cone and the main chute came out prematurely at the 48 second mark:

    Screen shot 2011-09-25 at 1.56.48 PM
    Screen shot 2011-09-25 at 2.15.49 PM

    and that’s why it took 8.5 minutes to return to the playa.

    Here are the launch photos and photos of the 6-hour prep on the playa. And here’s our HD video compilation, with footage from Pad Cam One and Two

  2. Love the Burning Man layer on it =)

  3. What are those patches of blurring along the GPS trace? Can you use accelerometer enhanced GPS with accelerometer guesstimation during signal loss?

  4. good eye – I wanted to remove some moments of data loss that showed up as spikes and normally I would edit out spurious data points from the GPS feed, but was having trouble with that and found it easier to smudge them out in iPhoto. If I can clean up the data feed, I’ll repost without the blurred bits. [which I just did, and now the line is green]

    @daveh56 – yes! If the winds were as high as aeronaut, she should have drifted a long way!

    Oh, and with a different rocket, I got a photo of the Burning Man site as it looks now:
    Screen shot 2011-09-20 at 11.25.02 AM
    This is looking back toward the bottom left corner of the photo above.

  5. Oh, and it gets stranger. When I look straight down at the playa, here with the N2801 launch in green and the L640 Vertical Assault flight in purple, there is a near perfect set of fractal crop circles in the playa, centered on our launch activities:

    Screen shot 2011-09-25 at 10.22.42 PM

    Alien wormsign? or perhaps vehicle tracks with pre-planned GPS routes to guide them?

  6. they left it up to our imagination:D

  7. The geometric circles are a part of a HUGE art project not having anything to do with Burning Man.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1236380/Worlds-largest-a...

  8. LOL – some people think we have only couple months left:
    weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/26535/alien-spaceships-to-a…

    here we go – they are coming to get us.. hm, some people have wild imagination… alien spaceships from planet zeeba are almost in town:D all walking dead zombies on our planet can rejoice:D

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