How Grafana helped a rocket engineering team break a world record

A university rocket engineering team from UCLA, known as Project Ares, successfully broke the collegiate world record for the highest liquid rocket altitude, reaching 22,000 feet, and won the Dollar Per Foot Challenge hosted by the Friends of Amateur Rocketry. This achievement was made possible through the use of Grafana, a tool that enabled the team to visualize data and monitor hardware issues during critical phases of testing and launch. The team's process involved two testing phases: cold flows on campus to check for leaks and anomalies, and hot fires in the Mojave Desert to generate a thrust curve. Grafana's dashboards helped the team perform leak checks, actuation checks, and monitor live data, which proved crucial for identifying and fixing issues before the record-breaking launch. The successful launch and intact recovery of the rocket marked a significant milestone for the team, which plans to develop new dashboards for live avionics data in future projects.