NASA uses Orions for Testing Series

NASA detailed in a public report:

 

"The testing Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel (COPV) Energetic Rupture and International Burst Test Series titled involved tanks with pressurized gas (nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, etc) being shot and their fragments are recorded and studied.

 

"The lightweight requirement comes at an increased risk of tank rupture due to the materials used in manufacturing . . . To mitigate and analyze this risk, NASA has developed a fragmentation software package to predict fragmentation effects from a COPV rupture event. As with all software simulation packages, real-world data is required to refine the results, making the simulation more representative of the rupture event.

 

"To obtain accurate weather conditions during each test shot, the test team utilized a dual-meteorology station setup that was mounted to one of the camera towers. The weather stations were Columbia Weather Systems Inc's Orion Weather Stations. Two of these weather stations were mounted to the same camera tower at different heights. One was mounted near the bottom of the tower at around 5 ft above ground level (AGL) and the other was mounted near the top at around 30ft AGL to gather both current weather conditions and also differences in ground level versus tree-top level conditions for each test.

 

"These weather stations were networked back to a control station in the control room and were recording 1 sample/second data during the entire test series. While each weather station records a large variety of meteorological data, the data that the team was most concerned about for each test temperature, relative humidity, and 3-second-rolling-average wind speed and direction."