Status: Success!
Original Launch Plans: (Here)
Project Manager's Summary
On September 20, 2008 20 students (including 7 from Moscow High School) launched 3 high altitude capsules containing radio tracking equipment, sensors and data collection computers. Sensors included temperature, pressure, and a magnetometer. All of the experiments were designed by the students and all hardware and computer software flown was created as a collaborative effort between multidisciplinary students from the University of Idaho.
The capsules were attached to a weather balloon and released from west of Wilcox, WA at 8:35 am on Saturday morning. In order to get ready in time for this early morning launch, all participants met at 5:30 am at Moscow. The balloon ascended at 1100ft/min through the Earth's atmosphere until it reached an altitude of approx 91,000 ft where the balloon burst and the capsules started their parachute descent back to Earth.
Students tracked the position and altitude of the capsules throughout the flight and were able to plot the position on a map real time during the mission. Due to the helical path of the balloon during the ascent and descent, the balloon only traveled about 20 miles. This left the chase vehicles with nearly on hour of down time in St. John waiting for the balloon to land nearby. The students easily recovered the balloon in a harvested wheat field south-west of St. John.
*Chief Communications Engineer's Note: This launch was the first flight test of a new data routing system which provides a realtime data link between the balloon and ground teams. The test was a success, with three capsules communicating wirelessly to provide realtime temperature and pressure to the ground teams as well as periodical link quality measurements. It was very exciting to see the entire system work perfectly within the operational specs.
Timeline
| Left Moscow: | 6:30 |
| Arrived at Launch Site: | 7:31 |
| Balloon Launch: | 8:35 |
| Balloon Burst: | 10:02 |
| Contact with Surface: | 10:39 |
| Recovered Capsule: | 11:27 |
| Arrived Home: | 13:00 |
Highlights
| Max altitude reached: | approx. 91230 ft | ||||||||
| % of packets received from each transmitter: | Microtrak Green: 99.2% (124/125) Microtrak Blue: 77.3% (58/75) |
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| Min/max temperature both inside and outside of capsules: |
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| Max velocity (both horizontal and vertical) and altitude in which the velocity was reached: |
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| Average ascent and descent rates: |
*Descent rate was calculated as distance from burst to ground over time from burst to ground |
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| Ground distance traveled, separated into ascent distance and descent distance: |
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| Total flight time separated into ascent time and descent time: |
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Data
Raw Data
This is where you can find all the raw packets, telemetry, and pictures taken during the day.
Data Analysis
- (Graphs/Plots)
- Temperature (internal and external) vs Alt
- Speed vs altitude
- Altitude vs time - Plot both actual and predicted
- Actual flight track vs predicted flight track plotted on the same map (with same starting location)
- One spread sheet with all flight data logged vs altitude saved in excel format
Pictures
Individual Team Assessment
Link to an assessment page for each team
Each team post discussion of goals and outcomes, assessment of launch, top 3 lessons learned
