Design a Rocket 2020 Secondary - NPL

Design a Rocket Challenge 2020 – secondary entries 1

Winner of Secondary School Category

Comments from UK Space Agency:

“This is a wonderfully drawn overview of a lunar mission,

including lots of detailed drawings of individual parts of a

rocket (including the rocket engines) and the mission profile.

Great attention to detail and highly accurate!”

Megan

The next page shows rocket design and payload detail.



Runner Up in Secondary School Category

Comments from UK Space Agency:

“This is a very cool design of a spaceplane, with clever use of bio-mimicry.

I particularly like that it has been designed to limit it's harm to the

environment, and that the colours have been inspired by the UKSA logo.”


Shortlisted Secondary School Entry

Darcy


Shortlisted Secondary School Entry Following are excerpts from a 39 page document with multiple mission objectives including

Ganymede landing….

Lunar mission Ganymede

The scientific value of a lunar mission to Ganymede:

Ganymede is the only moon in our solar system to own its own magnetic field. This planet has not been explored yet, and

may offer many opportunities in space exploration to see the

possibility of life and water on the planet.

The probe could take samples of the rock and sediment for

analysis and transfer the data back to earth.

Analysis of the atmosphere and the magnetic field would also

prove useful in gathering scientific data about the moon.

The surface could be monitored by mission control 24/7 to scan

for any anomalies or events that we would not have seen from

deeper space.

Teams could analyse different parts of the planet through

different parts of scientific equipment. As the payload is 30

Tonnes, a lot of science equipment can be stored, such as deeper

drills, mini rovers, larger surface scanners and telescopes.

My rocket can deliver large payloads, potentially even multiple

rovers or probes to explore multiple moons at once or the same

surface for a larger analysis of a given surface. This example is

given as a landing probe to Ganymede.

The rocket's power allows a payload to be delivered directly to

the needed planet, and the ion engines allow for extended

missions, with four times the power, it can slow down much

quicker than single ion engines which allow capture burns to be

quicker.

The given example uses a single heavy probe to a single

destination for simplicity as an example on how the rocket can be used to reach its destination. It assumes the perfect

circumstances for the given flight path.

DeltaV requirements:

Ground to Low Earth Orbit: 9400m/s

LEO to Geostationary Orbit: 2440m/s

GO to earth escape orbit: 770m/s

Earth to Jupiter Transfer: 3090m/s

Jupiter Transfer to Ganymede transfer: 2180m/s

Ganymede transfer to Ganymede Capture: 4790m/s

Ganymede Capture to low Ganymede orbit: 790m/s

Low Ganymede orbit to Ganymede: 1970m/s

Total DeltaV: 25 430m/s

The amount of DeltaV is much less than the total deltaV of the rocket,

thus much heavier payloads can be carried to a single moon or many

different moons.

Alexander




Shortlisted Secondary School Entry THE AUGURY The aim of the Augury is to further explore Jupiter’s system, particularly the icy Galilean moons – Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – in order to gain a better insight on the area for future crewed missions and the setting up of permanent bases following the success of current efforts to settle on the Moon and then Mars. The rocket is named Augury partially because this is defined as “a sign of what will happen in the future”, which I believe will be the case eventually as humanity’s innate curiosity pushes us to explore as far as we are capable of. The other reason is its relation to mythology: as Jupiter is an aerial god, his primary sacred animal is the eagle which held priority over other birds in the ancient Roman religious practice of Augury to interpret omens (good or bad). This seems fitting as we will be interpreting Jupiter’s system of moons for a possible future there, as well as for a better understanding of our solar system. To get to Jupiter’s orbit and be able to access its moons, the Augury will have 4 stages, so is a relatively large rocket. The first stage lifts the rocket off the ground, and my design utilises solid fuel boosters, which is advantageous as greater thrust can be produced with a simpler, safer and cheaper design so that less thrust needs to be produced by the main liquid engine, allowing more fuel space for the other stages and decreasing the rockets overall mass. After MECO, the second stage will get the spacecraft into low earth orbit, and gravity assist around the planet will help accelerate the craft without using more fuel to propel towards Jupiter. The second stage will help the third before it cuts off in executing the burn towards Jupiter, and the third will get the craft into Jupiter’s orbit, as well as assisting transport close to specific moons. The fourth will ensure the mission lasts and to assist sending separate spacecraft into orbit around the moons and until the rockets suicide mission into Jupiter following how useful Cassini’s was in giving more precise data about the planet’s composition while its antenna was able to point towards Earth. This also means re-entry to Earth isn’t a concern for the mission, allowing the design to be cheaper. The head of the rocket holds a capsule, part of final stage of the rocket. This will be fairly long, with its base holding a section for fuel, which is surrounded in solar panels to get electricity to help power the electronics and equipment aboard. The next section contains some hatches, which when necessary will use robotics to launch satellites and small spacecraft towards the specific moon in order to collect data on it. Some of these may contain land vehicles to find information from the surface. They will all contain an antenna allowing data to be sent back to Earth, whether this is directly or through the capsule. The top of the capsule will contain a range of scientific instruments along with the daughter spacecraft in order to record data and take photographs in different wavelengths (visible light, infrared, ultraviolet etc.). These could be temperature sensors, mapping, magnetometers, spectrometers, sounding/radar instruments, and anything else that could be useful. This will allow the Augury to send useful and in depth data of the moons and more on Jupiter itself for analysis on Earth. Your first name and age: Dana, 17



This entrant provided a rather splendid associated animation of both space vehicles,

3D modelled, gliding through space.


We received many entries with brilliant

ideas and designs. Selecting ‘the best’

was a very hard task.

There is hope for the future of space

engineering.

Many thanks for all the brilliant

submissions that follow.



Akshar


I’m 18 and this is my idea for an asteroid farming space shuttle. The flight path is from Earth/ Mars

to the asteroid belt in between Mars and Jupiter to harvest rare metals. An example being the

Psyche asteroid which is worth $700 quintillion.

Rather than a traditional payload the rocket has equipment for electrolysis mining to process whilst

on the asteroid for space and trip efficiency. The systems only has 3 components Hydrogen Oxygen

and electricity. Hydrogen powers the engines and Oxygen for the astronauts to breath but this can

be combined to create a high pressure water drill with the liquid and metal ions forming an

electrolyte solution

Jamie


Matt, Secondary, BioPod: Solution to Growing Food on Other Worlds

● Rocket is fueled by Methane, using Liquid Oxygen as an oxidizer. Both substances can be produced on Mars and other bodies, allowing the price of each launch to be reduced by reusing rockets.

● 2 stage design, allowing the craft to reach orbit with the first stage, then refuel and use the second stage for orbital insertion on other worlds.

● This payload will help the UK Space Agency to establish a role as one of the founding members of the first Mars colony by providing one of the most vital resources; food.

● The payload is a hydroponic growth system designed to establish food production before human settlers arrive on another world, specifically Mars.

→ The pod will move out from orbit using small thrusters, which it can also use to reduce its velocity when digging into the planet surface.

→ It is dropped on a partially icy area, so that the system can harvest water from the ice. The heat shield on the front also acts as a spike to dig into the ice.

→ A drill on the side mines the regolith for minerals, which are transported up to the plants via the water stream.

→ Finally, a small nuclear-fueled reactor is used to both melt the ice, and to provide electricity to the module.

● Seeds are pre-planted in inflatable bags on the central column. CO 2 from the atmosphere is cycled through the bags at a rate optimised for plant growth. The light received by the plants will be less than on Earth, due to Mars’ further distance from the Sun, therefore crops that can withstand low light levels should be used.

● Many of these pods could be landed in one area, possibly by a SpaceX Starship or other large spacecraft.

● Upon the first manned missions to Mars, they should have a reliable backup of food production to help kickstart the colony/ provide redundancy in case of food loss.


Abhinav



David



Thomas


Caitlin


Our Team - Team Neptune - is a team of five Year 7

students (4 boys, 1 girl)

Team Name - Neptune Programme

Team Resources - design and flight details attached and

full entry including videos etc found at https://thomaswebsites.wixsite.com/rocketcompetition

Of particular interest will be the all the finished tasks and

videos on

https://thomaswebsites.wixsite.com/rocketcompetition/finishedtasks

https://thomaswebsites.wixsite.com/rocketcompetition/designandflightplan

https://thomaswebsites.wixsite.com/rocketcompetition/about

All work from rocket design through the CAD drawings

through to website design was completed entirely by the

students and with no input by teachers.

We hope you enjoy looking at the website as much as we

enjoyed taking part.


Documents

Design a Rocket 2020 Secondary - NPL