FINAL BLOGPOST

Our sad faces after our last launch :(

Our overall assessment of this water bottle rocket project was that it was a good learning experience and a good way of looking at physics in real life scenarios. Our rocket was one of the best in terms of height and trajectory. What made our rocket the best? We think our extended body, thick cardboard fins, and heavy nose cone attributed to the success of our rocket. The one aspect of the rocket we did not possess was the parachute. Our first launch was with no attachments, just the bare bottle. That launch was approximately four seconds and had a lot of success compared to others in the class. The 750 ml and 60 psi put into the bottle was one of the reasons why it did better. Most of the others had only 500 ml and 40 psi. The added water and pressure created a more powerful lunch and is probably the reason we did so well with out a parachute. (http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/BottleRocket/about.htm-) (http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/BottleRocket/about.htm) These are the two links we found that helped us to make our rocket better. Our next launch we did was with a heavy nose cone (soccer cones), durable cardboard fins, and we added another bottle to our rocket to make it longer. The heavy nose cone and durable cardboard fins helped to keep the rocket more stable while in flight. The extended body of our rocket created a lower center of pressure which helped propel our rocket to a 10.4 second launch. Sadly, this was not on the "money" day. The next launch we tried to add a parachute which did not deploy and ended up getting our rocket stuck in a tree. Because our rocket was working well, we knew that we had to retrieve it. When we got our rocket we discovered that our nose cone and parachute were destroyed so we had to make a new one. For the final launch, we shot our rocket with a new nose cone and no parachute. This as we later figured out, was a very bad idea. The conditions on launch day were not good. There was very high gusts of wind and rain. We tried to launch our rocket between the gusts of wind, but as soon as we launched the wind picked up and caught our rocket. Our rocket went quite high. After all of our testing we came up with the perfect concoction of water and air pressure. (800 ml of water with around 80-85 psi) When we launched our rocket it went straight up in the air. On its decent down to earth, the wind carried our rocket off path and caused it to land on the roof of Akahi. The weather during our final launch days was our biggest challenge to overcome. The wind was very powerful and rain was heavy. The wind played a big factor toward the top of our rockets trajectory because it would come out of the enclosure of the buildings, this is why i think our rocket blew so far away.