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Wildfire was launched late Sunday
afternoon (Sept. 24) at XPRS 2006. This was its 21st flight!
Wildfire is 9 feet long, 5.5 inches in diameter and carries a CCD
video camera and a 1.2 GHz FM amateur TV transmitter that transmits
live video back to the ground during flight. The video is also
overlaid with textual GPS information showing altitude, speed and
location.
Link to onboard TV transmitter
information
This flight was on a
"Baby M", the
Aerotech
M1297 white lightning motor. The climb to altitude was
completely nominal with Wildfire reaching 6,187 feet. At
apogee it deployed two parachutes. One for the rocket itself
and a separate one for the TV transmitter payload. |
The two chutes seemed to
hang in the air for an unusually long time on this flight. At
least several minutes and maybe even 5 minutes longer than normal. I
suspect there must have been some sort of updraft from the heated desert
floor to keep the chutes aloft for so long. Despite that, the rocket
and that transmitter payload landed only about 200 feet from each other.
That's a first! Usually they are much further apart.
The TV transmitter worked
great during this flight but the onboard GPS was being troublesome.
The GPS is designed to provide information that is overlaid on the TV
image. Unfortunately, the GPS was drifting in and out of lock and
would not stay locked for very long. At some launches it works fine
and at others it has problems. (Of course at home it works fine too
so it has been difficult getting to the bottom of this problem.) At any rate, it lost lock just before liftoff on
this flight so the GPS information on the video image was not updated.
Dang it!
There was also another
technical problem with this flight. The down linked video was
unfortunately recorded in black and white not color. We had a
nice full color image on the TV monitor that we watched during the flight,
but the recording was being done by a digital camcorder that was unable to
pick-up the color burst in the TV signal. The onboard video is less interesting to watch in black and white, but it is available below.
Despite these two technical
problems the rest of the flight was perfect. It was a lot of fun watching
the flight in progress from the ground and at the same time looking at the
TV monitor to see the flight from the onboard perspective. Wildfire
was safely recovered and hopefully will fly many more times.
Some photos and videos from
this flight are presented on the page below. There are also lots of
other photos and videos from other Wildfire launches at these links:
