24 March 2012 was the West Michigan Science Olympiad at Grand Valley State University. As we had done in previous years (see this post from 2008 for example) Lisa and Roger went with others from the Wyoming General Motors plant to run the bottle rocket competition.
Some rules changes from previous years:
- the rockets could not change shape in flight – ie they could not deploy any system to lower the rocket to the ground more slowly. The rockets had to go up and come back down without use of things like parachutes
- the bottles could be no more than 1 litre now – in previous years they had been allowed to use 2 litre bottles
- each team could launch 2 rockets and the combined time of both rockets was added together, along with participation points to arrive at their final score.
Just lifted off – a lucky press of the shutter button.
Below is a gallery of pictures showing some of the goings on during the day (click one of the thumbs to open a slide show). Below that again is a gallery of images of blast off. Continue reading »