Yeah, not my finest work. Stay up late and wake up early designing a parachute, just to release it wrong and have the chute not open. But even though the design had a fatal flaw in that if the chute didn't start open it wouldn't open, the work that went into the multiple designs was there.
It also doesn't ignore the fact that since I didn't get the air resistance I needed to create a nice, relaxing flight for my egg, my parachute accelerated all the way to the bitter end. That left me wishing I had gotten a video of the failed flight for two reasons.
1) There is nothing like watching an egg smash against the floor of the school and not getting in trouble for it and;
2) I could have looked at the video more closely and figured out how fast my egg plummeted to the ground at by calculating how long it took, how heavy it was, and breaking that down into chunks (m/s/s).
Now if only I hadn't had my little mini-chute. Then it really would have fell in a hurry.
Anyways, I mentioned 3 designs. Well, I have already referenced my initial design. My "mini-chute." A cute little chute that probably couldn't hold my than a couple cherry tomatoes, just because it didn't have enough surface area. So I moved to my second design. A larger square parachute. The problem with this, it there was no real way to make it stay open and not fold in on itself. So I went to pan three (all made up as I went). My little mini-chute underneath a mushroom-top larger parachute. This design showed some promise and I was running out of time and materials, so I decided that I would except design #3 as my final test design.
Needless to say, it didn't go as I hoped. But the experimental design phase was there, and it was as thought out as can be for 1am and 5am. :)
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