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
Comments
Did you use an amplifier and/or a patch antenna for the 3DRadio?
Great stuff!
For the RTL, I suspect the APM code may need a patch to deal with such high altitudes. The default is to use the barometer for altitude, using relative pressure between the ground start and the current pressure measured by the barometer. It would be very interesting to see the data log from your last flight to see if this altitude worked reasonably as compared to GPS altitude. Did you get a tlog of the flight that you can post? It would be good to plot GPS_RAW.alt against VFR_HUD.alt and also look at the SCALED_PRESSURE packets to see what the barometer did.
The easiest workaround would be to set ALT_MIX=0 which would tell the APM to use GPS for altitude. A GPS altitude is not very accurate of course, but I suspect it will be better than the barometer at those heights, at least without some considerable work on the barometer driver to do better temperature compensation.
Cheers, Tridge
Fantastic, well done
Only 227,000ft to go.
Aw crap again on data.
When I downloaded logs, here is what I got..
[RF12test.7]
LOW
HIGH
LOW
HIGH
on and o n and on....
WTF....
Earl
Oh beautiful for spacious skies...
Great Work Earl ! Munroe will be excited ! you are Cleaver!Earl Cleaver ! When I was in school the teacher didn't like smart people she like cleaver people . Very well done You deserve to be proud! God luck on the Glider!
BTW...The SAME APM2 and 3D radios were used on this and the previous flight a month ago to 100,000 ft.
I think I hold the record for having the same APM2 at 100,000 ft twice !
Earl
OOPS, the launch was at 9 AM not 9pm.....
I work part time for Cosmiac as a UNM student going for an astrophysics degree. 1 year done and so far a 4.04 GPA !!! How did that happen ?? I ain't that smart. Profs must have felt sorry for this 66 y.o. student..
Earl
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