Cronos is a hybrid-fueled sounding rocket engineered by White Noise
in close collaboration with and under
the auspices of Libre Space Foundation. It is a project designed and
manufactured in an open and participatory manner at Hackerspace.gr.
Cronos is designed to lift 4kg of deployable, payload mass, housed
right below the airframe’s nose cone. Its paraffin wax and nitrous
oxide hybrid propulsion system is able to produce an estimated 3000 N
of thrust for approximately 3s. Thus, it is estimated to reach Mach 0.88
and an apogee of 3km AGL.
The sounding rocket is designed so it will
be safely recovered after the launch. In order to achieve this,
when at apogee, two parachutes will be ejected by utilizing CO2
cartridges so as to safely recover the full rocket, making it thus,
a 100% reusable sounding rocket.
Cronos is the effort of a team of University students to manufacture
a sounding rocket so as to be able to explore and identify the
challenges of such an endeavour. The students have familiarised
themselves with the processes and operations of following open
development and open-source approaches. The primary aim of the
project Cronos is to become the test platform for exploring future
possibilities of building more advanced rockets, capable of reaching
higher altitudes, designed and manufactured in a collaborative and
participatory way.
If you want to find out more about the Project Cronos, check out the
source-code repositories.