QMUL Aurora Society!!

Hello! We are Queen Mary’s Rocketry Team called Aurora! We participate in various competitions throughout out our years. The two main competitions we compete in are NRC and MACH

The National Rocketry Championsip (NRC) is a student led competition organised by UKSEDS. Teams of up to 10 students from different academic backgrounds work together to design, build, and launch a mid powered rocket whille following strict technical and mission requirements set by the organisers. The competition gives students the opportunity to have hands on engineering experience while also gaining skills in project management, testing, and real launch operations. 

The key challenge of the competition is to deisgn a rocket that can reach a target apogee of around 2200ft while carrying both a customer payload provided by UKSEDS and a rideshare payload designed by the team. Throughout the project, teams follow the ESA life-cycle which includes major design stages such as the Preliminary Design Review (PDR), Critical Design Review (CDR), Manufacturing Review (MR), and Flight Readiness Review (FRR), each of which ensures that the design is technically sound and safe before progressing to the next stage.

The Aurora Initiative's MACH-26 entry, named Gromit, is a project that aims to deliver a safe, reliable, and compliant launch vehicle capable of reaching an altitude of nearly 2 km and deploying a CanSat at apogee to measure atmospheric composition. Within the society, we encourage innovation and outside-the-box thinking from our members, and this rocket encapsulates that - utilising active roll control systems alongside a creative pelican nosecone to deploy our CanSat. Electronics are central to making this mission possible, Gromit relies on dependable avionics systems and sensing, control and accurate telemetry. Support from a PCB sponsor would directly enable the development of such systems that sit at the focus of our project, and allow our members to fully pursue these creative solutions, alongside future developments that our members will undertake. This makes the sponsorship not only valuable to this year's launches, but to the continued growth of QMUL's most ambitious engineering team. The pictures below showcase our last MACH launch!!