Development of a Reclosable Clamshell Nose Fairing for Sounding Rocket NASA 21.003UI

A reclosable clamshell nose fairing system was developed and succesfully flown on a Black Brant VC sounding rocket. The clamshell system involved the design of unique structural and mechanical subsystems to meet the experimenters requirements, withstand environmental conditions of sounding rocket flight and recovery, and be relatively easy to maintain with a clean interface between the experiment detectors and instrumentation section of the payload. The structures and mechanisms flown are discussed. The development of the equations of motion of the mechanism are illustrated and results of the test of the Engineering Test Model (ETM) are shown.