Overview

Hermes 2 is a direct successor to Hermes 1, building on it's successful flight. Critical architecture changes were made to improve the performance of the rocket. The vehicle diameter was reduced by .12 inches to eliminate the air frame tube over the motor case. The fins gained ablative leading edges. The avionics bay underwent a significant simplification. A lower electronics bay was added to allow for in-flight logging of data such as motor pressure, parachute load, and to record parachute opening. The motor design changed from an 8-grain BATES configuration to 2 BATES grains and a finocyl grain, which pairs with our new propellant to push the motor's performance to 74,000 Ns.