Two launches last week from Barking Sands, Kauai, will help rocket scientists ensure that critical onboard components don’t fail under the force of liftoff, Sandia National Laboratories announced.
The launches took place Wednesday at Sandia’s Kauai Test Facility, a tenant of the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility.
Since the dawn of the missile age, researchers have looked for ways to make sure that the devices on board don’t shake, rattle and roll into oblivion under the intense G-forces associated with accelerating from zero to Superman speed in just a few seconds.
“Screws can back out,” said Greg Tipton, a structural dynamics engineer at Sandia Labs, which has its main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif. “Things can break.”
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Computer simulations are most often used to gauge the endurance of the sensitive gear, but computers need real-life data to work with. That’s where the launches of Hot Shot sounding rockets come in.
Tipton and his team fitted the insides of the rockets with pea-size instruments that measure vibrations. That has produced data that will lead to more accurate simulations and tests on the ground, they maintain.
“Flight gives you combined environments that you wouldn’t get on the ground,” Tipton said Friday in a statement. “So, it’s spinning and it’s accelerating and it’s vibrating. There are shocks. It’s a whole different kind of environment.”
That could save taxpayers’ money by skipping about a year’s worth of research and development ordinarily needed to get the same level of information, Sandia said.
Olga Spahn, who manages the Hot Shot payloads, said that having better data at an early stage of development reduces the risk of failure and could improve the performance of future systems as components get smaller, lighter and draw less power.
The Hot Shot program, under the auspices of the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Department of Energy, tests prototype technologies used in nuclear deterrence. The name Hot Shot comes from the term “high operational tempo,” referring to the frequency of the launches, which began in May 2018.
The sounding rockets are designed to reach an altitude of about 230 miles and to fly about 250 miles downrange into the Pacific. Sandia uses refurbished, surplus rocket engines, making the tests cheaper.
Each flight contains several experiments from researchers at NNSA’s network of labs, plants and affiliated institutions. Sandia builds the rockets, integrates the experiments and conducts the launches.
Tipton and his team have collected vibration data from a few sensors on a launch and, from that, predicted the vibration environments on most payloads.
On Wednesday, Brandon Zwink, an engineering consultant on Tipton’s team, placed microphones around the launch site to measure the racket from the rocket, noise that produces its own set of vibrations.
