5.5" ATACMS Flight 3

In this graph the acceleration and blue altitude lines are unfiltered while the velocity and green altitude are Kalman filtered.

I had a couple of problems on this flight. First is that deployment was obviously a bit early. The AltAcc reports firing the drogue charge at 19 seconds so it must have been the motor ejection charge going off early. The time from motor burnout to deployment is a little over 9 seconds. This is considerably less than the advertised 14 seconds.

While it is possible that internal pressure caused early deployment it seems unlikely. The nose is held on with two shear pins and the earlier flight on a J460 in this configuration had no trouble.

The other problem was related to my first attempt at using the Defy Gravity Tehter device. The prospect of long walks resulting from this rocket drifting while under its main parachute (a Rocketman R7C) didn't appeal to me. So I rigged up the the rocket to deploy a R3C parachute as a drogue and bundled up the main in a pseudo burrito style to be released by the Tether. The Tether held back the R3C which was connected to the deployment bag of the R7C. The Tether also held a line holding the deployment bag closed.

The only problem was that sometime during the apogee event, the connector to the Tether was pulled out. As a result, the firing command from the AltAcc had no effect and the rocket landed under only the drogue parachute.

I use Deans plugs on my ejection charges for easy setup in the field. I had convinced myself that the wire was more than long enough to prevent any significant force being applied to this connection but I was wrong. The solution was to put a screw next to the connector and to wrap the wire around it. Now any pulling force will be applied to this screw rather than the connector.

Here is the data in a somewhat more raw form:

AltAcc data file. (binary, 8K)

Processed data (compressed text, 30K)

Kalman filtered data (compressed text, 44K)