Launch Day #4: Test of 5 Seconds

 

For our physic’s blog post this week, we are very proud to say that our parachute was successful on our fourth launch day. We met the minimum 5 second requirement by a fourth of a second, with our final time being 5.25 seconds. On the other hand, our launch wasn’t as successful as we hoped because it was more than 2 seconds shorter than our 3 seconds test launch last Friday. We hoped that this was due to the weather since it was very rainy and windy. Since our time wasn’t as good as we hoped, we decided that we should try to reinforce the fins in case that was a contribution to the problem. We found this website: http://home.comcast.net/~timhesterberg/HowToRockets/HowToRockets.html, and it taught us how to secure and duct tape the fins in order to make it more sturdy. Another reason why our rocket may have not went as good as planned is because we put 200 mL more water than we did the first time and pumped a lot more air into it. We thought that more air and more water would make the rocket go higher and faster, but this experiment concluded that this is not a correct theory.