Anudeep plays chess and tennis, enjoys music, and is a Boy Scout. His ideal career would be aeronautical engineering because "advances in space exploration border on the fantastic."
As a member of his school rocket club, Anudeep was excited to launch his first rocket. He was then greatly dismayed to see it get caught by the wind and drift into a lake 500 feet away. This incident and others experienced by his rocket club inspired Anudeep to design rockets that better resist the wind.
Anudeep tested model rockets under four conditions: unmodified and launched vertically, unmodified and launched at various angles, modified with fins tilted at 7 degrees, and modified with 7 grams of weight added to the nose cone. He launched each group 10 times and measured the distance from launch point to touchdown. The unmodified rockets averaged 99 feet of drift, while the others drifted much less. Homemade measuring tools helped him keep track of the rockets. In a year, his school rocket club has lost a total of 20 percent of the rockets launched. Anudeep's design could save not only the money invested in the model rockets, but the time it takes to build them and to search for those lost by wind drift.
