 |
|
|||
 |
 |
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
|
 |
||||||||||
 |
The Web | WRN.com |
 |
|||||||||
 |
||||||||||||
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
X-12 Water Rocket destroyed in fall from 1,819 feet (554 meters) while attmepting to set new World Record.
Updated: 11:21 p.m. EDT (03:21 GMT) December 2, 2005
West Charlton, New York (Routers) -- While attempting to set a new WRA2 record altitude, parachute
failure dooms X-12 and inspires herculean data
recovery effort.
U.S. Water Rockets recently revealed that their World Record holding
X-12 Water Rocket was completely destroyed in a crash while attmepting
to set a higher
Water Rocket World Record in the late afternoon on
Octover 29, 2005.
The day was very bright and sunny and there was a
moderate wind, but conditions looked favorable for a record attempt, and
the lighting conditions were very favorable to taking aerial movies of the
record flights, so X-12 was prepared for launching.A short time later, the
X-12 rocket was on the launching platform and holding the highest pressure
ever, in anticipation of the record flight.
First, the telemetry was activated and the camera
began filming. After a bried countdown, the release mechanism was
triggered and X-12 streaked skyward at speeds
approaching 300MPH. Once X-12 receded from view by the
naked eye, attention was turned to the telemetry receiver.
Everything looked normal until shortly after apogee when it was apparent
that something had gone seriously wrong. X-12 was descending at an
alarming rate and accelerating. The alarm was sounded and the
U.S. Water Rockets took shelter. Within seconds, the sound of
rushing air was heard and increased in volume and pitch until a loud crack
was heard a few yards from the launch platform. There, X-12 was spotted
protruding from the soil.
The area around X-12 was excavated, and the
remains of the payload section, including the altimeter, telemetry, flight
controller, and video camera were carefully exhumed from the hole. Close
inspection revealed that the X-12 pressure vessel was badly cracked and
the payload compartment was crushed to half of its normal length by tthe
impact, which struck a large stone 6" below the surface.
X-12 was carried back to the U.S. Water Rockets
workshop, where the payload section was disassembled, revealing that the
electronic circuit boards within were crushed and broken into small
pieces.
The telemetry indicated that the flight had gone
higher than any Water Rocket in history, but the failure of the parachute
deploy system relegated the flight to an obscure footnote in the history
of Water Rocketry for failing to comply with the strict safety rules
created by the WRA. The chief violation of the
WRA2 Class ‘A’ Water Rocket World Record Rules, was the speed at which
the rocket landed far exceeded the safety limits set forth in the rules. A
second infraction was that the X-12 Rocket was destroyed, preventing a
second flight from taking place that day to corroborate the data of the
first flight and validate the record. The last infraction was the loss of
the onboard camera prevented the video footage from being used to
substantiate the flight.
Discouraged by the loss, the U.S. Water
Rockets Team decided there was nothing they could do about the record now,
as there was no way to correct for the first two infractions, but there
could possibly be something to be done about the third.
It was discovered while examining the
wreckage of the electronics payload that the Flash-Type Memory installed
in the onboard camera was still connected to a fragment of the printed
circuit board it was soldered to, and it appeared to be intact. A few of
the leads on the package were sheared off on one corner, but the
Manufacturer Datasheet for the Memory revealed that these pins were not
used when reading the data from the device.
A hand-made circuit board was
constructed to interface to the memory devices, which were then carefully
removed from the remains of the camera and soldered in place on an adapter
board. Some custom software was designed to read the data file from the
Flash Memory Integrated Circuits, and upload this data to a PC. The
software was executed, and soon the contents of the memory were safely
saved on computer disk. But inspection of the data revealed a proprietary
file format was used and the video from the flight was not stored in a
simple fashion. After doing some research on Flash file systems, it was
obvious to the engineers at U.S. Water Rockets that the data from the
flash was stored in a slightly modified version of the SmartMedia Card
File Format specification. With this information, the video file was then
assembled from the data read from the Flash. However, the video file was
incomplete, having been abruptly cut off when the camera struck the ground,
and some important information was missing, as this is normally written to
the file when filming is complete. Further analysis of the data revealed
that the file was encoded using a Motion JPEG codec, which is well
documented. A known good video was created with a spare camera and this
was used as a surrogate for the missing sections of the crashed video.
When the known good information was appended to the extracted video file,
the video was successfully able to play, and never before seen
views were revealed.
Tackling this technical challenge has
inspired the U.S. Water Rockets Team to build an improved version of X-12,
which is well under construction. Using the flight telemetry
recorded in this crashed flight, the team knows that
X-12 was not nearly tapping its full potential when it last
flew. The successor to X-12 will easily reproduce and surpass
this altitude.
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
