IS
Team leader · Apogee & recoveryIbrahim Shafi
Flight models in MATLAB/Simulink, recovery timing and the link with the mechanical team.
PMU · Electrical + Mechanical Engineering · Senior Design 2026–27
Falcon 4 climbed to 3,724 m, detected its own apogee 0.32 s after the true top, opened its recovery with compressed CO₂ instead of explosives, and released a capsule that measured the air all the way down. Both bodies were tracked live by radio and recovered.
The mission
Student rockets are often single-use, and the air above us is rarely measured. Every part of Falcon 4 exists to fix one of these.
A hard landing or a lost rocket means building a new one.
The recovery opens at the true top of the flight, so the rocket comes down slowly, in one piece, and flies again.
Replay the flight →Temperature, CO₂, dust and wind all change with height.
Four air sensors and a GPS take a reading every second on the way down. The drift of the capsule gives the wind at each height.
See the air profile →Too early and the parachute tears. Too late and the rocket lands hard.
A Kalman filter fuses the barometer and the accelerometer. Recovery opens only when four independent checks agree, with a backup timer if a sensor fails.
Try a sensor failure →Black powder charges are risky to handle, store and test.
A CO₂ cartridge pushes the nose and capsule out. It is fired through an opto-isolated driver, and nothing can fire until the ARM switch is on.
See the recovery bay →The wind carries the rocket and its data far from the launch site.
Both the rocket and the capsule send their position by long-range radio, and the ground station shows where each one landed.
See the landing map →Mission replay
The flight rebuilt from the logs, with the same logic the flight computer ran. Switch to what if: barometer fails to see how the backup timer would have saved it.
Ascent plays at the chosen speed; descent is sped up 25×. Radio lines use the real packet formats our boards send.
Flight results Draft data
Read from the rocket's on-board log, the capsule's log and the ground station's radio record after recovery. Hover any chart to read exact values.
The barometer log against the pre-flight simulation. Markers show burnout and both recovery stages.
Times from launch detection, from the flight computer.
From the Kalman filter. It crosses zero at apogee.
From the BMI088: the boost, then near-zero while coasting to the top.
Every reading the capsule took from apogee to the ground, plotted against height. Grey points near the top were flagged during the CO₂ release and are left out of the findings.
Ground tracks from each GPS, seen from above. Rings every 1 km from the pad.
Signal strength of received packets against distance from the ground station.
Testing & validation Draft data
Each subsystem was proven on the bench or on the ground first, then confirmed in flight.
| Requirement | How we tested it | Pass criterion | Result | Status |
|---|
The rocket
Drag to turn it. Press Explode to pull the sections apart, then pick one to see what's inside.
Data path
Two computers, eight sensors, three radios. Hover or tap any block to light up its connections and see how it talks to the rest.
Project journey
Two semesters, built one tested subsystem at a time.
The crew
The electrical team built every circuit and line of code. The mechanical team built the airframe, the motor mount and the recovery hardware.
Flight models in MATLAB/Simulink, recovery timing and the link with the mechanical team.
Teensy 4.1 firmware, altitude estimation, apogee detection and flight logging.
Power distribution, the opto-isolated firing stage and the avionics circuit board.
The atmospheric capsule, GPS and LoRa telemetry, and the live ground-station dashboard.
Dr. Ahmed Abul-Hussain (EE)
Dr. Zeeshan Rana (ME)
Dr. Ahmad Baroutaji (ME)
Dr. Samir El-Nakla · EEEN 4393
Abdullah Albeloshi (leader), Hadi Alsadah, Mohammed Alkhalifa, Saad Alsaleem