Mjollnir is ÆSIR’s third major rocket project with our most ambitious goal of reaching 10+km in altitude. This is our biggest rocket to date, standing at around 4.5 meters with an outside diameter of 16 cm. The higher altitude poses many interesting challenges for our team when it comes to communication with the rocket, recovery of it and of course the rocket engine itself.

The engine is, just as for the previous projects, a hybrid. This means it uses liquid oxidizer and solid fuel as propellant. It is designed based on the same concept as Sigmundr, our previous rocket, but has a significant increase in complexity in order to increase combustion efficiency and to reach the desired altitude.

The higher altitude makes communication between Mjollnir and Ground Station more difficult which forces our Electronics Team to come up with new ideas in order to retrieve footage and telemetry data.

A new recovery system containing two chutes, a drogue and a main, has been developed in order to safely recover the rocket in one piece. The two chutes are a necessity for the system as a response to the high altitude. First the drogue-chute is deployed to slow the fall to a few kilometers, it’s only then that the main is deployed to slow the rocket down significantly til touchdown.