Cronos is a hybrid-fueled sounding rocket engineered by White Noise (a team of University students) in close collaboration with and under the auspices of Libre Space Foundation. It is a project designed and manufactured in an open and participatory manner.

Cronos is designed to lift 4kg of deployable, payload mass, housed right below the airframe’s nose cone. Its paraffin wax and nitrous oxide hybrid propulsion system is able to produce an estimated 3000 N of thrust for approximately 3s. Thus, it is estimated to reach Mach 0.88 and an apogee of 3km AGL. The sounding rocket is designed so it will be safely recovered after the launch. In order to achieve this is when at apogee, two parachutes will be ejected by utilizing CO2 cartridges so as to safely recover the full rocket, making it thus, a 100% reusable sounding rocket.

Cronos is the effort of a team of University students to manufacture a sounding rocket so as to be able to explore and identify the challenges of such an endeavour. The students have familiarised themselves with the processes and operations of following open development and open-source approaches. The primary aim of the project Cronos is to become the test platform for exploring future possibilities of building more advanced rockets, capable of reaching higher altitudes, designed and manufactured in a collaborative and participatory way.

The project has undergone its first successful Cold Flow test and is focusing on the Static Test, and if you want to find out more about Cronos check out the source-code repositories.