Optical System for Impact Determination of Sounding Rockets

Abstract: To be able to ensure range safety and quickly recover the rocket and any on-board experiment, it is essential to be able to track the rocket. For sounding rocket launches at Esrange, this is typically done with radar or rocket telemetry, it has, however, recentlybecome of interest to do so with an optical system. This thesis develops the necessary methods for an optical system used to track and reconstruct the trajectory of a sounding rocket. It further discusses the limitations of such a system, given the hardware andinfrastructure available. Finally, some of the methods are tested with previous rocket footage showing that the suggested method works well for the available test cases. The full method uses foreground detection to detect the rocket in the image and using thisdata from multiple cameras combine to triangulate the 3D-coordinates of the rocket. A simple calibration method for the cameras is proposed, and future work to improve the capabilities of the system are proposed. The results show reliable tracking of the rocket,but raises concern in the viability of using current hardware for tracking the rocket during daytime due to difficulties in the visibility of the rocket in these conditions. The developed methods are foremost suggested to be used in nighttime conditions.