Successful flight and a crash landing

Oct 3, 2010 – Danish Space Challenge (DSC) held a Rocket Festival at Borris Sønderland, Denmark, where five rockets built by German and Danish students were launched together with one of DSC’s own rockets. For the first time, the DSC rocket was flying an Arduino Duemilanove based flight computer which was responsible for releasing the parachute. This worked well. The payload in the rocket consisted of the digital video recorder built by yours truly, based on the Gumstix Overo Fire embedded Linux computer that I have been blogging about during the last few weeks, see here.

During the descent, the rocket got separated from the parachute and crash landed. Although the Arduino board and the Gumstix Overo Fire (mounted on a Tobi expansion board) looked surprisingly well after the crash, the microSD card where the onboard video was stored fell out and got lost either during the crash or during the recovery. Considering all the tape we used for the wires, we could have used a piece to secure the microSD card to the socket :o)

The first video shows the preparations, launch and recovery of the DSC rocket.

Watch video on YouTube.

The second video shows the inspection of the parts after the crash landing.

Watch video on YouTube.