Mach 26 · Badhbh

ULAS HiPR returned to Machrihanish for a third year to compete in Mach-26 Category 3 with Badhbh, the Irish goddess of death and the third vehicle in the sequence that began with Morrigu and Macha.

Badhbh was a 2.5-metre, fully composite rocket built around a series of new experimental systems: active airbrakes, custom CO₂ parachute deployment, a six-board avionics stack, a robotic walking payload and a muon detector.

The avionics bay brought flight computing, power distribution, telemetry, recovery deployment and airbrake control into one integrated structure. These two views show the flight hardware installed around the bay, rather than the boards in isolation.

The team won Best-Looking Rocket and Best Social Media at the competition. Badhbh completed a mostly successful flight and gave the team valuable flight data from systems that had previously existed only as separate prototypes and test assemblies.

Thank you to Analog Devices, EasyEDA, Immersive Software Engineering, Purcell Construction, onsemi, Luxium Solutions and the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Limerick for supporting the programme.