Carbon Edge 54 Altitude Flight
Black Rock Desert, July 22, 1997

My Carbon Edge 54 rocket reached an altitude of 18,110 feet flying on a K250-25, with an Adept Altimeter and Black Sky Research AltAcc (a combination accelerometer and altimeter) for redundant data recording and backup ejection. Adept altitude data is shown here, mathematically smoothed with median and 4-th difference filters, along with altitude-derived velocity.


For an interactive Java viewer showing this data, click here
The close-up below shows the raw data values versus the smoothed values near apogee. Chute ejection is just after apogee, after falling about 50 feet, which would be expected if the AltAcc unit ejected the chute. However, the time of ejection is just about where it would be expected if the motor ejected (10 second burn plus 25 second delay). Thus it is unclear which ejection mechanism occurred first. We suppose that if that is the worst problem we encounter, we are well off indeed! The ejection spike can be seen as a single raw data point that is an extreme outlier from the rest of the data.


For an interactive Java viewer showing this data, click here
Smoothing was done primarily to allow velocity to be derived from the Adept altitude data. This graph also shows that the smoothed data is a faithful rendition of what really happened. It is a myth that Adept units cannot yield good altitude/velocity/acceleration data, we have been doing so for many years now.

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