Aurora Rocketry

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NEMESIS

OVERVIEW

Aurora’s first competition rocket, Nemesis, is a single-stage vehicle, powered by a commercial solid motor, designed to carry a 1kg payload up to an apogee of 3000 m and to return safely to the ground thanks to a recovery system. The rocket is designed with reliability, ease of maintenance and assembly in mind.The aerostructure ensures stability and integrity, housing the propulsion system, electronics bay, recovery system, and our payload, Aether.

PROPULSION

The propulsion system uses a solid motor with a non-toxic APCP-based propellant (Green3), delivering 8187 Ns of impulse in 5.3 seconds. The motor is secured and centered inside the rocket using a phenolic tube, aluminum centering rings, and an Aeropack retainer, ensuring structural integrity and thrust transfer. Additional thermal isolation and redundant retention mechanisms enhance reliability.

RECOVERY

Nemesis features a conventional dual-deployment recovery system with two hemispherical nylon parachutes with reinforced stitching and integrated suspension lines. At apogee, the CO₂ ejection system is designed to separate the nose cone and deploy the drogue chute. The main parachute has to be later deployed via a three-ring release system, which frees the drogue to extract the main chute.

ELECTRONICS

The avionics system is composed of two independent units: a custom SRAD(Student Researched and Developed) system and a COTS(Commercial Off-The-Shelf) solution based on the Cats Vega platform. The SRAD architecture features two custom PCBs: a Sensor Board hosting the flight computer and apogee detection sensors (IMU, accelerometer, dual barometers), and an Antenna Board managing parachute deployment, analog circuits, GPS, and a 868 MHz radio transmitter.

AERODYNAMICS and STRUCTURE

The rocket’s aerostructure primarily relies on aluminum components, designed to maximize apogee while ensuring stability and structural integrity. It includes a nose cone optimised for aerodynamic efficiency and radio transparency, a set of three carbon-fiber/Nomex composite fins sized to meet flutter and static margin constraints, and a fiberglass boat tail to reduce base drag and disturbed flow.

PAYLOAD

Aether is a proof-of-concept CubeSat. Its purpose is to receive and save data during the rocket’s ascent phase employing a Software-Defined Radio, using signals from the Inmarsat constellation of geostationary satellites, responsible for aeronautical and maritime distress and safety services, located more than 35000 km above Earth’s surface. We aim to study the later received signals to develop a Matlab algorithm to calculate the rocket heading in real-time for next generations.