BX23 flight day

[Photo credits of the aurora before the BX23 flight: Michael Becker]

The day BX 23 took off, we had a count down starting at 3:30 AM.
All teams gathered at the dome (massive construction where gondolas are assembled) to finalize preparations and run the usual last tests before launch.
Things are tense until the very last minute, and the four hours countdown can easily last five hours and a half.
But nobody would ever complain: we are there, and our sweat and tears of the last year are about to fly!

Less than one hour before the final lift-off, the late access team comes back, after removing the covers from our solar panels. This is the last we could see OSCAR up close before the launch.
The last full three quarters of hour, the whole bunch of the BEXUS campaign participants stayed at the entrance of the dome, super excited while they witnessed a perfectly nominal balloon inflation and lift-off.

After nearly five hours, the cut-off sequence was initiated. We managed to gather a huge amount of good data until our battery dried out, shortly before the descending.
Less than 24 hours later, we could meet our experiments again, when the recovery team brought our gondola back. You can imagine our surprise when we saw that OSCAR's frames withstood the fall (through some tree branches, even!).

More info and many more photos will follow!
For now: Thank you!
ThanX to all those who supported and helped us during this intense year of preparation! It was worth every minute of work!

Campaign week process

After 5 days of work, OSCAR is ready and fixed on the gondola!
The last few days have been very very tiring, with a lot of mounting and testing to do, and the occasional ghost hunt for to resolve problems that were never really there... We troubleshot so much in the last month, that we cannot believe that we do not have anything else to fix!

Image Gallery

Make sure to keep an eye on our facebook page to follow our adventures :) In the meantime, we will take as many pictures and videos of our countdown and launch as possible! Like this we can report back soon and show you the payback of an entire year of work.

Campaign week has started!

After roughly one year of work, our team has finally made it to the end!

We packed the rest of our experiment in an awesome BRAVIA 55' TV box (just to make sure airport staff will treat it as gently as possible) and got on the plane.
As soon as we landed in Kiruna, we could find again (almost) all the other teams members!
Get in for a group selfie, everyone!

Of course, first thing to do in the evening/night/early morning of our arrival is not sleep... We need to get used to heavy schedules, so: let us re-mount SAM-V3! Remember the awkwardly large magnetometer we once buried in the snow during training week? Well, he came with us once again, but needed some new tweaks, which J&J worked on till too late.

The North of Sweden looks different without the piles of snow. We left a white mass of land in February, to find a green forest! That means a whole new set of activities possible for our free time!
... but will we even have any?
For now, we are busy assembling all components back, fixing last minute changes, and trouble shooting for the last time.

Keep tuned, as we will try to share our progress as frequently as possible in between the rest of the campaign preparations!

There it goes...

OSCAR finally left UHasselt, in a very heavy and sturdy wooden box.

... bye bye, baby Aury!

See you in Kiruna!

S.U.Z.Y. meets OSCAR

Our experiment passed its last review, and is finally ready to fly.

With this news, a lot of local news channels and science enthusiasts got really interested in us, and that's how we ended up not only on the local TV channel TV Limburg and in the national news paper Het Laatste Nieuws...

... but also tagged on Stijn Meuris' photo!

It was quite something to meet the man who sang about lovely satellite S.U.Z.Y, spinning quietly above the Earth and watching us from a distance.

Tot binnenkort, S.U.Z.Y!

Work work work work work....

Neverending work in space business!
Even if you actually stop at the stratosphere ;-)

Our electronics team needed to assemble lots of tiny components on our very cool Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), which are those fabulously practical sheets that hold all our connections. Since all the resistors, capacitors, amplifiers, and other elements of the circuit were not there yet, someone needed to spend long hours to position them on top of the right connections, paste them in place, and then "bake them" (the correct term is "solder") in order to create the link between the component itself and the electrical pathway hidden inside the PCB.

This requires quite some patience, good eyes, and a whole lot of time!
That's why we had an overkill of footage for this little timelapse video about the PCB finalization process.

The second head you see in the video is Thijs Vandenryt's, a brilliant engineer who volunteered to help us! Thank you Super TV!

... and this is how Aury was born!

A while back we learnt about how circuits are born.

Now it is time to praise the team who brought Aury up!

Our magnetometer is basically ready to fly, and that is because Jarda and Jelle (J&J) dedicated a lot of hard work and sacrifice to their little creation.

Here on the left is a very 'early' photo of Aury, when she was still a baby magnetometer, and needed to be connected to a few expensive lab tools to operate.

During the last few months, J&J made it possible for her to fly with her own equipment, designed especially to be light weight and "inexpensive" (she is still quite precious), and perfectly fit for the application we need.

The principle to probe the magnetic field is based on the splitting of degenerate energy levels, their photoluminescence, and the visualization of the whole process via the dips in the intensity of the exciting microwaves.
Before you get your minds in the gutter for this last element, make sure you refresh your memory on how we can use diamond to sense the magnetic field...

So, we need a microwave excitation to split the energy levels, a laser and a light sensor to create and detect the photoluminescence, and of course a lot of electronics and software to write down in files what is happening, so that we can look at the data afterwards.

This translates into having to "break down" the voltage, in order to power up the various components, which is done with the circuit on the left, then generating the frequency which will "time" the entire setup through the means of a square signal wave, which is handled by the circuit on the right, and of course in driving the laser correctly (which means making sure it always gets the right amount of current).









The only two commercial components which will fly with Aury are those which generate the microwave sweep itself (the timing of it is given by the home-built square wave signal generator).

But now, where is the actual diamond in all this?

It's where you see the green of the laser shining... right in her heart!

And beware, this is her last naked photo: she will get a nice dress by the time she will fly, because she won't be a little girl anymore!

P.S.: our testing also continues... on Youtube!