The University of Queensland will hold a free public lecture next month to discuss the recent recovery of the HyShot debris from the remote South Australian desert.
The lecture will include video and photographs of the recovery expedition, which had both ground and aerial search parties.
Dr Allan Paull and Professor Gordon Grigg of UQ’s Mechanical Engineering and Zoology and Entomology Departments will give the lecture at the Hawken Lecture Theatre (Building 50), Cooper Road, UQ St Lucia on Wednesday, May 8 at 7.30pm.
HyShot is a flight program to demonstrate hypersonic propulsion with airbreathing engines called scramjets, which operate at speeds in excess of 8000km/hr. The first flight was held on October 30; the second is planned for July this year at Woomera, north of Adelaide.
The first flight experienced an anomaly which meant the scramjet experiment could not proceed. The experiment was flung out of its planned trajectory and into an unknown location in the Australia outback.
The researchers said the recovery expedition was necessary to discount that the experimental payload was the cause for the mishap. With another flight due in a few months, and the engineers sure that their scramjet was not at fault, it became imperative, and a race against time, to find the missing payload to get to the cause of the problem.
Two RAAF Blackhawk searches and another search instigated by the HyShot team failed to find any trace of the payload. It was clear that they were really looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Two brothers teamed together to understand how to interpret telemetry data received from the scramjet through its final moments of flight, and believed it could be used to direct them to its whereabouts. Then a zoologist entered the picture in an unlikely sequence of events.
With a plane designed in the 60`s, a bike from out of the 50`s, borrowed from a man out of the 20`s, and a utility, they set out, full of confidence, to find a missing rocket somewhere in the centre of Australia.
In the end, this unlikely bunch of characters, of very different scientific backgrounds, developed a close-knit team and the kind of understanding for each other that was necessary to overcome the odds.
Media: For more information, contact Jackie Mergard phone 3365 3634 or Jan King at UQ Communications 0413 601 248.
