ARES Rockety Team University of Melbourne

The ARES Rocketry Team is a University of Melbourne society dedicated to constructing the best high-powered student-built rockets in the world. A Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology associated team, ARES Rocketry has over 100 active members working on our rockets. The broader social engineering club has more than 200 members.

United by an enthusiasm for aerospace, our diverse membership base includes both undergraduate and graduate students, studying predominately Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics however also include students of other disciplines.

The main competition that ARES takes part in is International Rocket Engineering Competition, having now competed since 2022. Hosting over 150 universities from all corners of the globe every year, The Cup is the largest and most competitive international high-power rocketry competition and the most difficult to succeed in.

In 2024, ARES had it’s most successful venture to Spaceport yet, coming 2nd in the 30,000ft Commercial Off the Shelf category, and 4th in the competition overall. Furthermore, our payload - a scientific experiment investigating the effects of acceleration on bacteria through ramen spectroscopy - garnered 3rd place overall.

We utilise custom PCBs for many of our projects, from avionics systems and payloads to our next endeavour: hybrid propulsion. Initially our projects begin as prototypes made from off the shelf components, however conforming to the SWAP (space, weight and power) requirements needed for a rocket, custom PCBs are a must. This also provides opportunities for our team to develop circuit and PCB design skills, utilising industry standard software and practices.

While we have many projects currently in the works from power distribution modules to airbrake controllers, our flagship avionics project is our Hermes Flight Computer.

Hermes is designed to be a fully standalone flight computer based on an STM32. It features 9 DoF telemetry, a barometer, GPS, 4 deployment channels, local data logging, as well as RF and wired communication.  By combining these data sources Hermes allows us to gain accurate knowledge of the rockets position during flight. This information is streamed to our ground station as well as our airbrakes controller, allowing it to perform time critical calculations to slow the rocket down and reach a target apogee. The airbrakes controller is a built for purpose PCB based on the RP2040.

The advanced design requirements for Hermes were made reality with the help of PCBWay, allowing us to construct a 4 layer PCB with tight impedance specifications.

Hermes integrates tightly with the rest of our ARES Compute Platform consisting of ground servers, camera streaming equipment, power modules, and many logic controllers. It is able to connect with these devices either through RF communications or a CAN Bus cable that runs through the rocket. With PCBWay’s help we plan to turn many of our prototypes into industry quality deployments.