Aerobrakes — Lesson 2: OpenRocket Benchmark

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Now that RocketPy is comfortable territory, the team needs a trusted reference point to check its own simulations against — that's what this session establishes.

Objective

students understand and can defend the existing OpenRocket simulation of the team's competition rocket as the project's ground-truth benchmark.

Session Activities

Open the team's existing OpenRocket file together. Each student picks one input parameter — mass, drag coefficient, motor selection, fin geometry — and works out and explains its effect on predicted apogee. This isn't about redesigning the rocket; it's about understanding why the existing simulation says what it says.

Then run an unmodified RocketPy simulation of that same rocket and compare its output against the OpenRocket numbers. Document any discrepancies you find — don't try to fix or explain them away yet, just record them honestly.

Deliverable

A notebook writeup listing where RocketPy and OpenRocket disagree, and the team's best hypotheses for why. This deliverable becomes useful later — several of the debugging lessons in Rocket Math's own case study trace exactly this kind of simulator-vs-reference discrepancy back to its root cause.

Maps to milestone P1-M2.