Hello! Today I’m going to tell you a little bit about our new rocketry society here at Oxford and how we are entering two competitions, the NRC by UKSEDS and the Mach25 competition. Our goal is to simply give students here the opportunity to design, build and launch rockets. This can be for fun or for career prospects!
NRC Team
The NRC team, known as OxRocks, is entering the NRC competition by UKSEDS, which entails launching a rocket to 2,500ft, and (hopefully…) recovering the rocket intact after a parachuted descent. They have been working since the start of the year, testing electronics, designing the structure and working well as a team throughout the busy terms.
So far, they have submitted the PDR, the preliminary design review and the CDR, the critical design review. These involved selecting the right motor, materials and sensors for the rocket. We are very grateful to RS Components, who have granted us support by providing some of their electronics and kit to use for this project. Because of their support, our team have been able to thoroughly review their hardware options and test it before the CDR.
Now that the CDR is complete, the manufacturing process will begin, before they send the rocket sky high in June! They have designed a custom PCB to connect their Pi Pico with their barometer, camera, accelerometer and an SD card. Assuming all goes well, we will have plenty of data from the flight to help us improve in further year and to see how we compared against our flight goals!
Mach25 Team
The Mach Team are taking part in the yearly Mach competition run at the Macintosh Airbase near Campbeltown, Scotland. Due to the remote nature of the site, they can launch to a much greater altitude. With the greater altitude, comes a greater technical challenge, so our Mach Team primarily consists of those with more rocketry experience.
With a altitude goal of 2km and only a year to design the rocket from scratch, the team have had a tight schedule, but they have been very productive, recently submitting their PDR on schedule. Another of the mission’s goals is to successfully deploy and recover their CanSat, which will contain a plethora of sensors kindly provided by RS Components. Each year the Mach competition has a special focus for their CanSat objectives, this year it is to involve the use of Machine Learning. To this end, the team has decided to use Machine Learning to analyse ground features using an onboard camera and post-processing post recovery.
Building a Society
Building the society thankfully doesn’t have the same technical challenges as the rockets, but we did encounter other hurdles along the way. Applying for funding, getting recognised by the university and organising talks and teams has been quite a handful. Thankfully we are very proud to say that within a year we have organised two rocketry teams full of passionate people, of which some, will be launching their first rocket! Along with this, we have managed to organise multiple talks from researchers, engineers and more all about aerospace, space and rocketry!
We are grateful to everyone who has supported us, to everyone working in the society and also to RS Components who has kindly provided us with support.
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