A dart is the free flying final stage of a

sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are often ...

, and contains the

payload Payload is the object or the entity that is being carried by an aircraft or launch vehicle. Sometimes payload also refers to the carrying capacity of an aircraft or launch vehicle, usually measured in terms of weight. Depending on the nature of t ...

. Its form is very

aerodynamically Aerodynamics () is the study of the motion of air, particularly when affected by a solid object, such as an airplane wing. It involves topics covered in the field of fluid dynamics and its subfield of gas dynamics, and is an important domain of ...

designed. After the launch stage burned out the dart is detached and continues to rise only with its own

inertia Inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless a force causes the velocity to change. It is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics, and described by Isaac Newto ...

. Some sounding rockets are available both with or without dart. The version without a dart is able to transport more payload, but reaches lesser height.

Applications

Mohr Rocket The Mohr Rocket was a sounding rocket developed by Ernst Mohr in Wuppertal Wuppertal (; ) is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, in western Germany, with a population of 355,000. Wuppertal is the seventh-largest city in North Rhine-Wes ...

MMR06 The MMR06 is a Soviet/Russian rocket for meteorological experiments, with a length of 3.48 metres and a total weight of 130 kg. The MMR06 rocket was built in two versions: One version had a conical top, the second one, named MMR06-M, had a de ...

Hopi Dart Hopi-Dart was an American sounding rocket used by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center for aeronomy studies in the early 1960s. Design Hopi-Dart was a two-stage vehicle, combining a solid-fuelled Hopi III first stage with an unpowered Dart sec ...

* Loki-Dart *

Meteor A meteor, known colloquially as a shooting star, is a glowing streak of a small body (usually meteoroid) going through Earth's atmosphere, after being heated to incandescence by collisions with air molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a ...

Mesquito The Mesquito is an American sounding rocket vehicle developed for the NASA Sounding Rocket Program on Wallops Island, Virginia. The Mesquito was developed to provide rocket-borne measurements of the mesospheric region of the upper atmosphere. An ...

References

Meteorological instrumentation and equipment {{Rocket-stub