Harborfields High School’s science research students recently worked on a spring engineering project, testing their homemade rockets and parachutes. The project follows the rules of the Science Olympiad event called Ping Pong Parachute. Students are given a half-liter soda bottle and a ping pong ball and tasked with getting as much hang time as possible for the ping pong balls. The bottles were launched with 50 psi of air pressure. Students were allowed to use a wide range of materials as long as they didn’t provide any chemical propulsion to the rocket. The hang time was measured by equipping the ping pong balls with a sensor that could detect movement down to the hundredth of a second. Students had to break the project down into three components: aerodynamics of the rocket, parachute design and payload deployment.
Date Added: 6/19/2024