Space Systems Laboratory

GSC P-12A IMU

GSC P-12A IMU (Garvey Spacecraft Corporation Prospector 12A Inertial Measurement Unit) was a Kentucky Space mission which involved designing, building, and flying a six-degree-of-freedom (3-axis accelerometers and 3-axis gyros) IMU which would be suitable for use in sub-orbital rocket flights with recoverable payloads.

Garvey Spacecraft Corporation, in coordination with the California Space Authority, flew the IMU on its Prospector 12A rocket which launched 09:56 PT on 11 October 2008 from Koehn Lake, a dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert roughly 19km northeast of California City. The liquid-fuel rocket which weighed in at roughly 200 kg, achieved an apogee of approximately 900m.

The IMU performed nominally and the data was successfully retrieved from the payload and later processed, enabling Kentucky Space students to recreate the flight path of the rocket using MATLAB.