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Old 01-27-2011, 05:05 PM
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Location: North Tejas
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blackshire
This could be the seed of a fascinating NAR Research & Development contest category entry. You could use the same "wind-weighting" equations that are used to aim the launchers of full-scale unguided sounding rockets so that the rockets will land in desired impact areas. As the folks at Wallops Island, White Sands, Woomera, and other ranges do, you could collect pre-launch wind data from a ground-based portable anemometer and acquire "winds aloft" data by tracking the motions of released helium balloons. (The "big boys" sometimes botch their "wind-weighting"--the second British Skylark sounding rocket veered far away from its assigned impact zone on the Woomera Range in Australia because the launch crew accidentally skipped one of the equations that they used to compute the rockets' trajectories based on the winds aloft!)



On the micro scale that we deal with, the winds change way too much for this data to remain relevant.


Bill
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