Japanese students take on rocketry challengeーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS
In our next report, we followed Japan’s top high school rocketry club as they went to compete in a World Championship. The International Rocketry Challenge was recently held in Paris. It’s where small and lightweight model rockets are used to give students hands-on aerospace engineering experience. It’s the speed of this studentdesigned rocket can reach around 180 km per hour. Launch experiments are repeated to meet the target altitude and keeps the flight time within a specified range. Housed inside the rocket’s roughly 60 cm long body are gunpowder, a parachute, and raw eggs representing onboard astronauts. If the eggs break, the team is disqualified. The students are members of a club based in Tokyo. It’s reached the pinnacle among Japanese middle and high school teams in just four years since its foundation. As they prepare for the world competition, they say the secret to their strength is teamwork. I’m really good at polishing it until it’s so shiny I can see my reflection. The nose cone polishing is done to reduce air resistance. I’m working on the design right now. It’s fascinating to see the rocket I’ve created gradually take shape. The team’s 12 members are all secondyear high school students. Hashimoto Yunoske is the team’s founder. I think our strength lies in properly applying each of our specialties. The parachute is key to controlling the rocket’s flight time. The team prepared nine of them, varying in size by 1 cm increments, so they can be flexible in the dry climate of Paris. The big day has arrived. They’re in Paris for the competition held as part of a prestigious international air show. Four countries are competing. Japan, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. I trust in our efforts and hope our launch goes well. The winner is the rocket which gets closest to an altitude of 233 m with a flight time between 41 and 44 seconds. Both targets are about 1.5 times more than the Japanese competition. There is no second chance. 6 5 4 3 2 1 ignition. The rocket launch was strong, but the gunpowder burned faster than expected. That caused the parachute to deploy early. I was expecting we might do better than we did. The result was quite painful for me. Their knowledge and teamwork placed them in second place for presentation, but the Rockets performance landed them in fourth place overall. It was a really fun 4 months. We spent a lot of our after school time actually building rockets and launching them. Going through that whole process was such a great experience. Building rockets from scratch place the students on the world stage. An experience that may well inspire their future careers.
Japan’s top high school rocketry club competes in a world championship recently held in Paris giving them hands-on engineering experience. #japan #education #science #rocket #craft #engineering #paris
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