Launching Satellites in the Arctic

T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and … misfire?!

From the moment the first rocket launch (with the CanSats for the Austrian and Norwegian teams) misfired yesterday morning, we knew we were in for a most interesting day out at the rocket range.

Although we had to endure four hours of uncertainty as to whether we would get our Cansat back (because the retrievers on the snow-mobiles couldn’t find it), the day ended in joy for the Irish/Crescent team. Read the full story here and here.

Because of space restrictions at the rocket range conference room, I had to spend most of Monday back at the hotel while the teams gave their introductory presentations (I understand our team did quite well). I went over in the evening to offer technical assistance with the pre-launch preparations and checks.

Yesterday was the actual launches. Our team was very calm and confident, having done all the necessary preparations beforehand. There were complications with most launches: as mentioned earlier, the first launch misfired and we had to wait for an hour while the rocket was inspected before re-launch. By the end of the day, a number of Cansats had been damaged in the launch: in one case, a pair of Cansats collided with each other during ejection from the rocket with one Cansat breaking the servomotor arm of the other while accidentally switching itself off in the process! The Spanish Cansat was last spotted 0.7km above the earth – never to be seen again (which is very unlucky since the same thing happened to them last year as well).

Our launch went very well and, while we didn’t get the Cansat back till much later, got good data readings and got right to the analysis. Thanks to our Excel templates being all ready beforehand, we had useful graphs and information within a matter of minutes.

The data analysis and presentation preparation went on into the night, though not too late (by engineering standards, that is!) The Cansat came back almost perfectly intact and in reusable condition, so not much explanation of what went wrong etc… Our accelerometer gave us enough information to build a narrative picture of the launch and then we did some work on data loss analysis and suggested improvements in future launches etc.

The presentations are still on-going though the Irish team finished its post-campaign presentation about an hour ago. Gearoíd, Eimear, James and Gavin did very well and got only one, relatively minor, post-presentation question from the judges. Fingers crossed for the results…

If you haven't done so already, take a look at the Crescent Cansat team blog at http://crescentcansat.blogspot.com/.