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Nimes technical college (IUT) has turned into a space center since September.
Building a rocket is a specialist's job. The students also need to learn to collaborate.
Collaboration is an essential skill for them.
Communicating the way people do in a company is not easy to learn.
This project gives us the opportunity to use the different skills and knowhow of our various departments in a common project.
The students and their rocket have enrolled in C'Space, a contest for future engineers
which will take place in August. Electricians and computer techies are already on the job.
I'm a student of Electrical Engineering and LANs. In this project we deal with the electronic cell,
the sensors, the measurements, the onboard experiment and the opening of the parachute.
The Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Engineering have designed the
structure of the rocket.
We've had two main constraints, the weight first and the resistance,
since our metal structure will have to absorb all the energy released by the motor,
roughly 1000 Newtons, which is a considerable amount of energy.
By using aluminium, a light metal, we should be able to absorb this energy and avoid any
structure deformation at take-off.
The adventure will end on a beach of Biscarosse next summer.
Will Champagne be in order? We'll know at the end of August.
The Fusex contest has existed for 50 years. It is organized by C'Space, an association
which is part of CNES. Their aim is to help the students who wish to build an experimental rocket.
Three departments of the IUT are in the project,
Materials who deal with aerodynamics, the parachute, the nose and the tube,
Mechanics who are in charge of the whole structure as well as the plate which will hold the motor
in the rocket and Electronics who deal with the electronic cell and its programming.
The IUT took part in the huge project of the Robusta satellite. This project was a long
term assignment; it took us five years to build the first microsatellite. It was thus
difficult for our students to immerse themselves completely in a project they were not going to see the end of.
Fusex allows us to involve three departments of the IUT on a one-year project
which should end with the launch of our rocket.
C'Space went very well for us and our Nemo'Space rocket.
The flight was nominal, which means that the rocket took off normally, the hatch opened
at the apogee, the parachute deployed well and we recovered the rocket on the beach,
100m from the shore. We got lucky there.
The rocket even reached an altitude of 2100m instead of the expected 1800m.
This experience allowed us to understand how interesting such a project was for us.
We wanted to build our rocket in a year, an objective which might have seemed ambitious at first
but we did it and we had the pleasure of launching our first rocket after only one year of work.
Something very important with C'Space is that we were able to share our ideas and skills
with other student associations. Everything we learnt will be precious to us in our future projects.