Rocket Recovery Software

Hi All,

I have written some software, which I call StrewnLAB, for the purpose of locating meteorites, and I am now wondering if it might be useful for locating lost rockets. Could you tell me if there is any such software already available and is it any good? Wind would be a huge factor in where rockets land and my software automatically downloads and processes the latest weather balloon data from the government servers and produces a probability map to show the most likely place to search. Do you think there would be interest in the model rocketry community?

I would need to learn a bit about rocket thrush and drag, and make some minor modifications to the software, but how hard can it be? It's only rocket science...

If anyone has a lost rocket I can help you find, I would be looking for some test cases. Feel free to contact me.

Thank you!

Jim Goodall
www.Strewnify.com
[email protected]
+1 586 709 5888

Hi, interesting stuff!

The huge majority of rockets don’t fly over 2000 ft. Flights above 5000 ft are common but don’t make up a significant portion, and are often equipped with a gps tracker.

At first glance, my guess is that any estimation from weather balloon data would still be too uncertain to be practical. Especially since wind direction changes quite a bit from ground level to balloon altitude.

As for software, RockSim and OpenRocket are the most popular. And for data on motors, I use thrustcurve.org.

Good luck!

Like the above comment stated, anyone who flies much over 2000' these days, uses GPS or at a minimum some type of RF tracker. Those that don't use tracking devices are typically low fliers (<2000') and I have seen more of these rockets lost in deep grass/weeds/bush.

Does RS Pro include wind data for the 6DOF Monte Carlo splash? Either way, having a second tool to crosscheck would be pretty useful.

I think this would be incredibly useful. To be able to somewhat predict a day or two out some possible landing locations of certain rockets could be very helpful during the beginning stages of a recovery mission, even if a rocket has a GPS locator.
Maybe to start, simply assuming the rocket goes straight up from the launch point to altitude, and then running the landing prediction algorithm from there?

The Cambridge Rocketry simulator software provides a Monte Carlo splash pattern of rocket landing points based on multilevel wind data. You can use the stand alone applications, one of which uses the OpenRocket GUI, or the Matlab routines.

https://cambridgerocket.sourceforge.net/

The standard OpenRocket does have an addon that uses multilevel wind data, but does not provide a splash pattern.

https://github.com/rocketsam2016/MultiLevelWind/releases/tag/latest