[AR] Re: Flight Computer
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2015 18:00:55 -0500 (EST)
On Thu, 24 Dec 2015, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
Playing catchup here... I can't prove it, but my suspicion is that amateurs
could get most of the benefit here at a fraction of the cost. If your
electronics can't stand being bolted in the bed of a pickup truck for three
fast miles down a dirt road...
One of the folks involved in the Oersted magnetometry satellite (Denmark's
first scientific satellite, launched 1999) once commented: "the launcher
people suggested that a very good approximation of launch conditions were
to strap the prototype PCBs directly to the engineblock of a two-stroke
car and drive around with it for a couple of hours".
That may have been a rather extreme worst case -- I think Oersted went up
as a secondary on a Delta II, which is notorious for giving its payloads a
rough ride. (Our lab director has been heard to say that when the very
last Delta II flies and there is thus no chance that anything of ours will
ever be launched on one, we're going to ceremonially burn the Delta II
secondary-payload manual.)
Wholly scientific, no. But then adding some sort of decent-bandwidth
vibration/shock sensor - a small weight suspended on three axes with strain
gauges on each axis? - is there such a thing off-the-shelf?
There are off-the-shelf accelerometers for vibration measurement -- the
giveaway is that the DC response (to steady acceleration) is lousy or
nonexistent, while the response to oscillating loads is specified up into
the kilohertz range -- and I expect you could get complete three-axis
packages, but I've never gone looking.
Henry
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