Good evening. I am new here so please excuse me if this is inappropriate for this forum. I have scoured prior posts and haven't found quite what I'm looking for. Please point me in the right direction if this has been addressed elsewhere.
We recently launched to 4,000 feet and it was our first go at a dual deployment with JLCR for our main. We set it to release at 300 feet, but our JLCR deployed at or near apogee along with our drogue. We know this from our GPS data and on-board camera. It resulted in a drift of just under 1 mile (very high winds that day). Thankfully all systems were recovered successfully but we are baffled as to why our main didn't deploy at the prescribed altitude. I have seen other threads were release pins or elastic bands broke, but all of our components were completely intact. We performed shake, release and "puff" tests prior to launch, without issue. We believe the band was tied with sufficient tension and the tether had enough slack as to not carry any shock cord load. I'm wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar or might offer some insight as to where we could have gone wrong. I imagine there was some user-error involved but we don't really know where to begin our troubleshooting.
We are also trying to put together a white paper of sorts for future team members as to potential failure scenarios or misconfigurations, so maybe this could serve as a foundation for that. For instance, is there a "sleep" mode? Will the device default to apogee release if it detects any user errors (as apogee release is obviously more desirable that no release!), etc. I can provide pictures of how it was wrapped if that helps.
I'd also like to add that this product is fantastic and we are very excited to use it for future launches!
For reference, I am with the Rutgers Rocket Propulsion Lab, recovery team.
Thank you for any help!
We recently launched to 4,000 feet and it was our first go at a dual deployment with JLCR for our main. We set it to release at 300 feet, but our JLCR deployed at or near apogee along with our drogue. We know this from our GPS data and on-board camera. It resulted in a drift of just under 1 mile (very high winds that day). Thankfully all systems were recovered successfully but we are baffled as to why our main didn't deploy at the prescribed altitude. I have seen other threads were release pins or elastic bands broke, but all of our components were completely intact. We performed shake, release and "puff" tests prior to launch, without issue. We believe the band was tied with sufficient tension and the tether had enough slack as to not carry any shock cord load. I'm wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar or might offer some insight as to where we could have gone wrong. I imagine there was some user-error involved but we don't really know where to begin our troubleshooting.
We are also trying to put together a white paper of sorts for future team members as to potential failure scenarios or misconfigurations, so maybe this could serve as a foundation for that. For instance, is there a "sleep" mode? Will the device default to apogee release if it detects any user errors (as apogee release is obviously more desirable that no release!), etc. I can provide pictures of how it was wrapped if that helps.
I'd also like to add that this product is fantastic and we are very excited to use it for future launches!
For reference, I am with the Rutgers Rocket Propulsion Lab, recovery team.
Thank you for any help!
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