Bottle Rocket day 2

 
 Today was the day we launched our rockets. The goal was to get around 10 sec of hang time. My rocket, the one in the picture, got a best time of 10.7 seconds, even thought the parachute didn't fully deploy. Using the orange cone as a nose cone worked really well. It was shaped in a good shape, and had room inside to stuff the parachute. Unfortunately, the only flaw was that the parachute would often get stuck in the nose cone and not pop out to save our rocket. One of our launches ended up with the nose cone buried literally 4-5 inches deep in the ground. On our last launch, we left part of the parachute hanging out of the nose cone, the parachute ended up fully deploying, but it slowed down the rocket on the way up by causing more air resistance. We filled the rocket to about 1/4 full, and attempted to get between 80-100 psi before launching.

     From this project, I learned about the importance of balance and the movement of projectiles. Once our rocket was launched, it became a projectile. In order to achieve the best flight, we had to balance the rocket so it would fly straight, the fins greatly helped this. The mass in the nose cone helped keep the rocket on track, but if it didn't deploy the parachute, it fell super fast. Overall, I didn't learn a large amount of new physics, but it was good to see what we had learned put into practice when shooting the bottle rocket.