Description
Cronos is a hybrid-fueled sounding rocket engineered by the student team White Noise in close collaboration with and under the auspices of Libre Space Foundation. It is a project designed and manufactured in an open and participatory manner.
Cronos is designed to lift 4kg of deployable, payload mass, housed right below the airframe’s nose cone. Its paraffin wax and nitrous oxide hybrid propulsion system is able to produce an estimated 3000N of thrust for approximately 3s. Thus, it is estimated to reach mach 0.88 and an apogee of 3km AGL. The sounding rocket is designed so it will be safely recovered after the launch. In order to achieve this when at apogee, the recovery sequence will begin with the ejection of the drogue parachute followed by the main parachute at the appropriate altitude. The two parachutes will be ejected by utilizing an in-house built CO2 system, so as to safely recover the full rocket, making it thus, a 100% reusable sounding rocket.
It’s advanced materials make Cronos lightweight, with a dry weight of only 21kg and a length of 4m.
Cronos is the effort of a team of University students to manufacture a sounding rocket so as to be able to explore and identify the challenges of such an endeavor. The students have familiarized themselves with the processes and operations of following open development and open-source approaches. The primary aim of the project Cronos is to become the test platform for exploring future possibilities of building more advanced rockets, capable of reaching higher altitudes, designed and manufactured in a collaborative and participatory way.
