Tyson Butterfield

From small onboard cameras to high-speed cameras, BYU Rocketry uses cameras of every kind to document manufacturing, testing, and launching of our rockets. Of all of these, our on-board cameras play a very important part in evaluating payload, airbrake, and general rocket performance post-flight. Quite literally, these pictures and videos are worth thousands of words as we strive to ascertain the impacts that different design features have while in flight. This camera that CCTV Camera World helped us to get will be going on our IREC (Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition) vehicle and will be specifically helping us to avoid and evaluate fin flutter, a common occurrence on high speed rockets. Usually this only happens for a handful of seconds during flight and is impossible to see on the ground, yet wreaks havoc on the internal integrity of the rocket frame. As we analyze the pictures and videos, we are able to avoid this simple yet disastrous event. We also use cameras mid flight to verify parachute deployment and allow the use of manual overrides and backups to ensure that we are able to successfully recover our vehicles. Rockets are costly to build and adding simple features to make it possible to use them over and over will always be a worthwhile investment.