Can you spot a piece of the burst balloon against the total blackness of space at 100,000 ft. ?
You can also see how thin our atmosphere is !
See the curvature of the earth.
The wire with silicone at the end is part of the 2M APRS antenna. The white things are parts of the burst balloon.
Did anyone see the balloon track on APRS.FI on the internet on Tuesday 5/29/2012 at 9 pm ? Callsign is ke5vsh-1 if you want to see the track.
The 3D radios on 433mhz worked well all the way sending APM2 data down. I will try to post some of the data. The temp inside our package was from 86 to -15 degrees from launch to touchdown.
I will give links to the Top,Side,and Bottom cameras when the files get uploaded.
Another great flight ! Now going to launch the 7 ft. 8x glider with APM2 in it for a RTL and maybe an autonomous landing in about 2 weeks. The test flight is only to 30,000 ft. to test everything out. If all goes well we will launch the glider every 2 weeks with scientific packages on board.
I sure hope the RTL will work because we spent 5 hours in the hot desert retrieving this last shot ! My director says the APM2 RTL would be sooo much better. I will keep you posted.
All this work is by Cosmiac LLC funded by NASA and the University of New Mexico.
Earl
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Hi Earl,
Thank you for sharing all your work ! It's impressive !
I have a questino about your 433 Mhz radio setup.
What kind of antennas have you been using on the ground and in the air? Home made ? circular polarized ?
re: Canadian student opportunities . . . from Winnipeg's Shaftesbury High School Sharp ll project (see above) to Institute for Space Science Exploration and Technology Students Group (ISSET) at Alberta University.
Here is a nice technical overview [youtube] video featuring Anacapa School's successful high-altitude balloon probe (AAHAB-2) released May 5th reaching 111,814 feet.
Great Pictures! Hopefully the Sparkfun logger will have some interesting data.
I'm not convinced that we really need accurate altitude for RTL, but as Tridge pointed out, the GPS is probably the best bet (ALT_MIX=0). I intentionally set ALT_MIX=1 for my flight since I wanted both the mix (100% baro) and GPS altitude in my log. I suppose as far as APM1 was concerned, it was operating at what it thought was 117k ft.
This was APM1/BMP-085 performance. I didn't see any issues with the code at altitude but I didn't have nav parameters turned out (a mistake). It would have been good to get waypoint distance, altitude errors...to see if there were any invalid or poorly scaled calculations. The attitude solution seemed to hold together pretty well even after shaking and stirring on the way up. I can say that the code didn't hang up and no unusual events like restarts were encountered (an important result). If I had it to do over, I would have put the nav tuning data into the log.
The "pop" video really shows the risk of fowling if no cut-down or separation method is used for a plane.
Next up for me is coding the todo list and simulation eval like what was in an earlier thread by Andrew. This does include a release.
Can't wait to see more data from this flight.
Earl
You can hear the sonaleart beeper and the pop and the wind !
here is a link to youtube to see the pop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYP3LfPNVvg&feature=youtube_gdata
Earl
I wish i knew how to embed here.
Here is the last log on the Sparkfun data card. Same as all of them.
Dang, can't upload log.
Here is what is on ALL the logs....
HIGH
LOW
HIGH
LOW
HIGH........ AND ON AND ON AND ON....
I used 2 satellite 434 mhz on a boom. Very high gain. We had 3D radio lock all the way up and down. Lost lock at about 5,000 ft. coming down cause we weren't sure where to point antenna. We were only about 10 miles from package coming down after burst.
The APRS worked good. That is how we knew where it was. The GPS on the APRS unit is good to over 120,000 ft. Look it up, it is a Byonics unit, 10 watt tx designed for balloon launches. Http here
http://www.byonics.com/mt-rtg
We also had a sparkfun data logger on the APM2. On same serial port the 3D radio was on. I haven't looked at that data yet.
I suspect the APM2 was not putting out data as we had green lock light on ground station but no data coming into the mission planner. With ^A we could see both radios but even in terminal on mission we saw no data during flight.
The APRD last tx before burst was 99,062 ft. You can see flight and data on APRS.Fi serch for call sign ke5vsh-1 and time set for last 4 days. Click on one of the tx dots in path and you will see alt, batt, and temp. The trouble with that data is it was only transmitted once every min. Thats why we think it passed 100,000 ft because the last going up measurement of 99062 then sometime in the next min the balloon burst. The resulting tumble was quite violent. The next APRS was far down into the fall. Here is a pic of the burst.
All 3 cameras worked flawlessly up an down (EXCEPT) about 2000 ft before impact all 3 cameras quit.They were all on same 2000ma battery.
I'll have more later
Earl
Firstly, congatulations!
I've some questions:
Had you got radio link all the time with the ballon? It's a very very long range to the radio system!
GPS device (MKT3329) stopped work when the ballon reached over 18,000m height? (CoCom law)
APM2 barometric pressure sensor (MS5611) only works up 10mbar (~25.000m), Can you obtain correct data from this sensor during the flight?
Thanks in advance for all this useful information! :)
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