Today was the official first day of the CaNoRock course, everyone arrived last night at about 11:30 pm, at which point I promptly got up to go to bed... and slept in halfway through breakfast! The jet-lag is mostly gone now however.
A fellow who works here at the ARR (Andoya Rocket Range) named Joren Grande gave us a first introductory lecture into all the cool things they do here. As I alluded to above, that includes LASERS, rockets, radars, as well as weather balloons, drones and delicious foods. They give REALLY GOOD presentations here.
In the middle of that lecture, he brought in the rocket we will be firing off, a CRV-7, which is a Canadian (Bristol Aerospace) built air to ground missile that is not used anymore (yay for turning weapons into research tools!) . It's about 3.5 feet long, but still has enough room for a decent amount of payload (the sensors and other stuff that the rocket motor carries up into the atmosphere). Have you ever been in a class and the presenter brought something to show and tell? Well Joran brought a frickin' rocket... and passed it around. Two people needed to hold it at once basically. I attempted to take a picture but I guess I failed, as I cannot find it, so here is a picture of a cat staring at a fake bird in stead of the rocket, please forgive me:
After passing around the rocket for a while, we took a tour of the rocket range. The command and control centre, many monitors and computers, big red buttons and miles of cable -> makes an engineering student drool.
Also, pictures to come later from someone else, but TWO humongous launchers encased in shelters that move to let the giant structure move itself up to an elevation angle appropriate for the type of day and rocket being launched. One was owned by NASA, and the other by ARR.
In stead of that picture, I give you the death star, built by the Norwegians before George lucas even envisioned it:
After lunch, which consisted of soup (a creamy tomato base with noodles) we went back to the lecture room to learn about rocket science, the history of rocketry (sad at points, hilarious at others and generally just crazy) as well as our Mission. At one point this evening we were talking about the early days of human space flight, and how rocket men would be up there all alone, and just wouldn't be the same when they came back. Our mission is to build, test and launch a CRV-7 outfitted with various sensors to an altitude of over 9km, and to get the data in real-time (since the rocket will splash into the ocean) and then interpret the data.
After dinner (pictured below because I know how much you guys are jealous of my new food experiences :) we built paper rockets. Don't laugh at the paper rockets, it is actually a very good exercise in putting your rocket science to use, where should we put the fins? how many fins should we have? where should the centre of mass be? where should the centre of pressure be? And last but obviously not least, what is our rocket's name? My rocket's name is Double fin, because we doubled up the thickness of the fins and my partner suggested the name. My partner btw, his name is Eino I believe (pronounced "I-no"), and is from the University of Oslo.
Question of the day: what does LIDAR stand for?
I have to get to "Social time - party!" now. See you guys tomorrow.
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