Weight Efficiency Strategies for an Extended Duration Sounding Rocket

The proposed development is a technology maturation effort in support of the sounding rocket program office (SRPO) objective to develop a payload capable of extended duration flight. Previous analysis has shown that a typical sounding rocket payload weight must be reduced by 20 to 30% to achieve the target science observation time above 150 km. We propose to evaluate new approaches in sounding rocket payload system architecture and design that result in weight efficiencies, to document the results and recommendations in a “white paper”, to provide a representative CAD model to demonstrate proposed component or layout re-designs, and to provide a representative payload mass properties budget using a previously flown sounding rocket payload as a basis.

• Reducing payload weight has the potential to enable the payload recovery of an extended duration flight by facilitating a more favorable trade-off between science time and instrument/payload recovery.

• Reducing payload weight enables longer observation times for science missions, particularly for celestial and solar telescope experiments.

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