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It was just about a perfect Spring day for a launch, warm temps, light winds, clear skies and dry, non-frozen ground. I did this launch alone, as everyone else was busy with Spring work. Me too I guess, but it was to nice a day not to fly. I loaded the propellant into the motor, then installed the motor in the rocket and left for my launch site.
I quickly set up the launch pad and ignition system. The on board camera was started, the timers were powered up and checked one last time.
Countdown; 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and ignition!
The rocket jumped off the pad in a perfect flight. Right at apogee the drogue chute appeared, I counted anticipating the main chute deployment. Right on time I heard a pop, and saw the rocket drop a few feet, pulling the main chute out. Well, almost. The main chute got hung up in the body tube and didn't quite make it out. That was my own fault, I really packed the main chute in there, it was way too tight. The rocket continued down and made a good, albeit fast landing not far from the launch pad in the soft, freshly tilled field.
I ran over to the rocket, the on board camera really should have still be running, but it wasn't. The camera will turn off after 30 seconds of no use, so perhaps there was still some video shot and the camera had just turned off when it landed. I carried the rocket back to my van and removed the camera. The camera has play back capabilities so I powered up the camera to if there was a video on it, there wasn't.
Disappointed, I headed back home. There was one more chance, I hadn't thought of it after the first flight, or rather, I thought of it too late. I have software that allows recovery of erased data, perhaps there was still information on the memory card I could access. So I plugged the camera into my PC and ran the Directory Snoop program. The first erased file had 32 mega bytes in it. So I ran the recovery software, then ran the file. There was indeed video data there, but there was a lot of garbage and artifacts in it. The video itself was almost senseless in play back. But there were individual images that I could capture. The audio was totally lost. So I captured some images using Video Mach, below is some of the recovered images from the start of the flight to just before landing.
Just before launch.
Liftoff!
Boost portion of the flight. Looking south.
Looking southwest.
Looking west.
Appears to be apogee. Looking northwest.
Looking east. To the lower right is my home town.
Under the drogue.. West again.
My home town again.
Just before landing you can see my van, the launch pad was on the field by the curve in the driveway.
Well, it wasn't a total loss anyway, as I did get some still captures. As you may have noticed I didn't use the mirror to look straight down, these shots were of course, looking straight out the side of the rocket. I still don't know why the camera isn't recording properly. The camera was recording the entire flight, so the batteries couldn't be loosing contact or it wouldn't have continued recording. The only thing I can think of, is that the memory card may be loosing partial contact, or there is something else loose in the camera that makes intermittent contact. For the next flight I may try retaining the memory card somehow.