We started out the day making last minute revisions to our Estes rockets. We then walked across the river to Magazine beach to launch! We first tried a ½ A engine in each rocket. The 1/2 A6-2 engine was not quite powerful enough and the rockets did not go very high, but this allowed us to test out the rockets, before using an A8-3 engine. The A8-3 engines propelled our engines high up into the air with great success. What is an A8-3 engine? The terms 1/2A, A, B, and C (or higher) tell us the impulse delivered by the engine as you can see in this chart. The next number tells us the average number of Newtons of Force which the engine delivers. The last number tells us the number of seconds of delay before the ejection charge for the parachute is set off. You can read about this on the Estes website. After returning to B.U. we worked on our soda bottle rockets.
After lunch, the students went to a talk in Smart Lighting. Almost immediately after that, Professor Glynn Holt talked to the students about with years with NASA and his research into the science of bubbles and drops. Dr. Holt served as Co-Investigator on STS-50, directing efforts of the Yale research team on design and implementation of ground-and space-based experiments for the inaugural flight of the Drop Physics Module (DPM) on the first United States Microgravity Laboratory (USML-1) on STS-50. The experiments investigated the dynamic effects of small concentrations of surfactants dissolved in water drops positioned in the DPM using acoustic fields. Dr. Holt served as an Alternate Payload Specialist (APS) on STS-73, the second United Microgravity Laboratory mission (USML-2), which flew October 20 – November 7 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia.
We spent the remainder of the day working on our bottle rockets which will be launched in the morning.
