KEHODA !

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Final Questions ?

1. What issues or problems did you encounter during the project?
-Getting our rocket to stay in the air to meet the required time, to build a successful parachute, & to stop people from swearing in our videos!!! 
 
2. How did these issues and problems affect the performance of your rocket?
-First of all, the problem with our rocket not staying in the ten seconds did not affect our rocket, but it will affect our GRADE ): The parachute affected how our rocket came down, either fast or slow.

3. What did you do to resolve the issues and problems?
-We tried rebuilding our rocket, trying to improve it by every launch. We rebuilt our parachute more than four times.

4. What was the result of your solutions?
-It improved, but it broke, so we couldn't really say that our improvements were quite successful. 

B A S I C A L L Y ....

Our main water bottle rocket broke due to the failing of the set up. While pumping, the set up simply turned on its side, & by the time we realized it, we had already counted down 3-2-1, & pulled the string. It shot straight for another classmate named Marcus, whom we are very apologetic to right now, & it hit him. ): But anyways, due to our broken water bottle rocket, our kind physics teacher, Mr. Hutchinson, allowed us to use another bottle that was laying around in our classroom. We had fun repeating each launch with this new bottle that we had found but it wasn't the same as our old rocket therefore, it was hard for us to make changes to it. We just sticked with results of our own water bottle rocket which wasn't consistent as the other groups, but all in all, the purpose of this project was to have fun, which we accomplished very well. (:

NOTE*

The video of our most successful launch can be found below, which was our very first launch.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Video of our very first launch :D

Click here to watch a clip of our very first launch of our water bottle rocket.

*If you attend Kamehameha Schools, you might have to use up your quota time in order to watch this video. So if you do have quota time, don't use it on this video, it's not  even worth it.

First Launched Rocket

Here's a photo of the very fist rocket that we had made. You can see that we used a total of 3 fins, a nose cone made out of the binder dividers,  & a parachute man for our parachute. We basically bought an already made parachute from Waianae Longs Drug Store & cut off the man's body & taped him to the top of our rocket. The fins are made out of cardboard, all cut to the same size & just overlapped with duct tape for more weight. The nose cone is also made out of the binder divider & tightly wrapped & assembled with glue from the hot glue gun.

Flight Data

Mass of the empty rocket : [n/a]

Mass of the full rocket : [n/a]

Total flight time : 5 seconds

Time to maximum height : 3 seconds

Estimated maximum height : [n/a]

*note that we didn't take the mass or measure the maximum height of our water bottle rocket because there will be much more launches that we will want to attempt. Therefore, we decided to take down measurements & just take the average out of all of the data. 

First Launch (:

Successful things:
 -our bottle
-the pump
-Ke'alohi's video recording

Non-successful things:
-Holeka & Dahni's video recordings
-Parachute
-Strings
-The man attached to the top of our bottle, he didn't stick with the tape that we used. We think that the bottle was too damp for it to hold the sticky tape.

Was our launch the same as our prediction?
-No, we didn't really think that it would have been so unsuccessful than we had predicted. We thought that our rocket would have remained in the air for a lot longer than it usually did. 

Possible Improvements:
-We need to get a much larger & more efficient parachute, evenly distribute our strings better & we also need more weight on the bottom of our bottle to let the bottle fly in a straight line upwards.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

The Construction of our Rocket

-What were some of the biggest challenges with your construction?
The hardest thing was trying to construct the nose cone in order to fit our parachute into it. We had the hardest time trying to figure out how our parachute will somehow pop out of our nose cone & drift our water bottle rocket safely to ground. 

-What factors did you take into consideration regarding the construction of your rocket?
Once again, we had to figure out if our nose cone was big enough to hold our parachute & also if our nose cone wasn't heavy enough to keep it from dragging our rocket from flying smoothly. 

-Make a prediction about how your rocket will perform on the day of the launch.
Well, we have been keeping our positive attitudes ever since we started constructing our water bottle rocket. Therefore, we think our water bottle rocket will meet the requirements. (: We are truly excited for this & have been looking forward to launch day every since we have been introduced to this project.