Attitude control aims to control the angular states of a vehicle. At LRI, we apply attitude control to our flight vehicle to prevent and correct unchecked rotational motion. This ensures that all of our vehicles fly straight up, and do not spin about the longitudinal (roll) axis of the rocket. 

Roll control is particularly important in our efforts to construct a pump-fed liquid rocket as excess rocket rotation can induce pump cavitation, a phenomenon where vapor bubbles form in low pressure regions and violently collapse, causing rotor damage.

Our team has chosen to perform aerodynamic control due to the constraints of other techniques such as thrust vectoring if they were to be implemented into our project charter. Aerodynamic control works by transferring the momentum of the working fluid - in this case, the air moving relative to the rocket - to exert a force on the control surface. Our rocket ailerons do just this, applying a force at a lever arm from the rocket's center of mass to create a torque about the rocket's roll axis.