Meteor

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Current Status (08/2007)

Currently not much work is being done on Meteor as most of our effort is focused on Martlet, however Meteor will eventually become an important part of this project, initially to recover Martlet's launch platform and then when a more compact system is developed to recover the rocket itself.

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Meteor

The aim of the Meteor project is to design a system which can bring a falling body safely to earth at a pre-specified landing site. The aims of the project are:

• Achieve a safe landing speed for objects descending from any altitude in Earth's atmosphere.
• Make landfall as accurately as possible at a pre-specified set of coordinates
• Get a large range, to allow relatively inaccurate control of position at deployment and still be able to get to the desired landing site.
• It must be a deployable system, so that it does not take up too much space before use.

Based upon these requirements we chose to develop a paraglider based system. Paragliders give greater glide distances and have better controllability then conventional parachutes. The are also deployable from a small package, unlike a sailplane.

The inflateable wing of the paraglider is steered by a microcontroller driven servo. The microcontroller will take inputs from a GPS module, an inertial guidance unit and a magnetic compass. These three units give the following data to the microcontroller:

• Altitude
• Speed
• Direction of motion
• Heading
• Attitude
• Rate of turn in yaw and pitch

In addition to these systems Meteor will be fitted with a means of detecting its rate of descent.

Meteor is intended to be attached to a third party payload. Possible applications of the technology include:

• Precision aid drops in developing nations, preventing such aid falling into the hands of military organisations.
• Recovery of high altitude reasearch devices which would otherwise be lost, such as those launched by balloon in Antarctica. This would allow researchers to send more effective equipment as it would not need to be disposible.
• Recovery of very high altitude devices, such as the Martlet rocket, to their launch site, to reduce the cost and difficulty of recovery.