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During Bexus 6/7 launch campaign (3rd-11th October 2008)
Watch us on
Euronews
Change the video language using euronews link: http://www.euronews.net/en/article/30/10/2008/student-projects-fly-high-in-northern-sweden/
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Low Cost Inertial Navigation System The developments, and the performances improvement, of the Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are rapidly changing the inertial sensors scenario. Their limited volume, mass and power requirements, together with the low cost, make them an interesting solution in the aerospace field. Onboard balloons, where navigation solution can be already provided by satellite navigation receivers, they can efficiently offer a conservative back-up, but above all they would provide attitude data and an increase of one order of magnitude in available data rate. A proposal for an inertial unit intended to fly on balloons has been made by us, answering a ESA call for student experiments onboard BEXUS balloon flights. The designed navigation unit is based on three-gyros and three accelerometers, calibrated with temperature sensors, packaged as a unique COTS part, and includes a pressure sensor and a magnetometer for aiding. The navigation solution will be compared with GPS-only mission data during the post-proccessing. The proposal succeeded and our experiment flew onboard BEXUS 6, launched from Kiruna (Sweden) on 8th October 2008 .
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Rexus-Bexus is bilateral German-Swedish cooperation to offer students experiment opportunities using sounding rocket and stratospheric balloon flights from Esrange in Northern Sweden. An announcement of opportunity was made in November 2007 for flight campaigns in 2008 and 2009. Each flight will carry a payload consisting solely of student experiment. BEXUS experiments are lifted by balloon from Esrange to an altitude of 20-35 km and for a flight duration of 2-5 hours, depending on total experiment mass (40-100 kg). The balloon has a volume of 12 000 m3 and the experiments are hanging 65-100 m below the balloon.
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Esrange Space Center is located in northern Sweden, 45 km from the town of Kiruna at 67°N, 21°E. It is a rocket range and research centre located outside the town of Kiruna in northern Sweden. It is a base for scientific research with high altitude balloons, investigation of the aurora borealis, sounding rocket launches, and satellite tracking, among other things.
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We were on TV...
