Throughout the 2019-2020 school year, ROSI will be busy with multiple projects.
Our main project of the year will be building a new 5” rocket to fly in the Argonia Cup 2020. Our previous 4” rocket has flown five times these past two years, so we will be upgrading to a larger more useful model. Using a bigger rocket allows us to be more flexible when working on our payload, since it provides us with a bigger work area.
The second project we have going on is our drone. Years past, there have been some difficulties with successfully deploying and recovering our drone. This year we plan on testing the drone a lot sooner to make sure that we get everything right and that the drone is ready for the competition in the spring.
Our third project is mixing fuel. We will be mixing the fuel that we will eventually use to launch our small 3” rocket this school year. There is a lot of training that will be required to do this, but in the long run, this will greatly benefit our team by reducing the price of our motors significantly. This also allows us to get our chemistry department involved in a project-oriented Student Organization.
For our fourth project we will launch our 3” rocket again, but this time we will be putting an experimental payload in the rocket to get more testing done with other types of recovery systems that could be used for our competition at Argonia. Basically, it will be a simple controlled descent vehicle used to gather some data for our future projects.
Lastly, backed by the STEM Outreach Center, just like the year before, we will be taking our love of rockets to local schools, inspiring future rocket scientists and relating classroom instruction to real world applications.