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Author Archives: mangeard
Kisses from the strat
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
As of May 16th 2018, 00:07 Swedish Time, AESOP-Lite is in the air, and Roger has officially become the first koala to experience space-like conditions (a claim that is unfortunately impossible to corroborate…).
To totally misquote Jane Austen, it is a truth scientifically acknowledged that the third time is indeed the charm. After two consecutive attempts at launch, cancelled due to uncooperative weather, our payload finally took off on its cosmic journey to Northern Canada through the stratosphere. Any attempt to describe the intense combination of dread and elation we felt as the ballon was released, the pin connecting the gondola to the crane pulled, might fall flat (a tragic event, had it happened to our balloon…)
Our gondola hanging from the crane
The beginning of inflation, no Bang this time
Bye bye birdie
The night was short, as we immediately started tracking its altitude and position, and monitor our instrument, bombarded by particle showers as we climbed through the troposphere. After 3 hours, we reached a float altitude of 138kft, without dropping any ballast.
So far so good, we are getting organized taking shifts and letting the weary get some much needed rest.
Currently, the payload is leaving the coast of Norway, and if we care to be more exact…
Payload position as of 13:14:06Z 05/16/18
Latitude: 68°43.38 N
Longitude: 15°26.00 E
Altitude: 135576 Feet
Heading: 12.85 Knots @ 262.00°
…Hello Esrange!
Can you hear it? Can you hear the winds blowing across the lonely hills of Lapland, the infinitesimal sound a snowflake makes as it lands, the distant howling of a moose herd?
If you can, well, maybe you’ve also found yourself in Esrange, Sweden, at the Swedish Space Corporation Center, where rockets and, well obvio, balloons! It’s now been 10 days since our arrival in the Arctic, all of us terribly excited for AESOP-Lite maiden’s flight.
Roger wondering why he has to live through yet another winter
A short recap of what has happened in the past week or so: well, first, we were relieved to see that the sea container had arrived from Texas with no damage done to our equipment and payload, elementary concern you say! The first steps consisted of getting our GSE (Ground Support Equipment) setup and running the instrument to check nothing fatal had happened to it during its cross-Atlantic voyage (it didn’t!).
James inherited the painstaking task of trimming our foam shell, after it was decided that we should match our thermal model to that of the previous LEE flights. Crocodile Dundee style, giant knife in hand, James beautifully butchered and rejuvenated our wrinkled shell (could this be related to his proud love of meat??)
Our shell 2.0
It turns out that in science too, practice makes perfect, and that repeating everything we had done in Palestine turned out to be a much faster process: Pierre-Simon and myself worked on recalibrating the pulse height analysers of each PMT (photomultiplier tube), as well as the altimeter reading, using two highly precise barometers to cross-calibrate. Knowing the pressure outside the shell will be crucial in order to monitor the altitude (which will later come into play in our data analysis).
A few days were spent setting up the LEE calorimeter under the instrument, in order to measure the energy deposited by incoming particles, and cross-calibrate (I love this word) our reconstruction algorithm: the calorimeter provides us with another method to measure the energy of the incoming particle, a whole other beast from the magnet spectrometer and tracking detectors of AESOP-Lite. After playing around the high voltage power supply- and getting invaluable advice, such as “don’t lick the 1600V output Sarah”- and trying to resolve the issue of magnetic shielding, we finally managed to have some runs with the calorimeter in coincidence. It has yet to be seen whether any low-energy particle made it all the way down the scintillator without getting deflected by our 0.3T magnetic field…
The LEE calorimeter under the instrument
The instrument now sits on the gondola, and we are about ready to test the solar panels and the telemetry. More to come…
[wpvideo ffJJRvvW]
Goodbye Palestine
Hello friend, anonymous reader, you who perhaps got lost in the vastness of the Internet,
I am writing this entry from Santa Cruz, CA, where after our 40 days of integration in Texas, I have resumed my tranquil existence. What has happened in our last week in Palestine: a discombobulating weather forecast, a disjointed compatibility test, a day trip to Austin, and the packing of our equipment to Sweden.
After our thermal vacuum test, we were very close to being ready for the final hang test (also called compatibility test), where the gondola is mounted in its flight configuration, with the solar panel connected to the battery box, telemetry scheme in place, and the gondola hanging from a crane a few feet above ground. We then send commands to verify “uplink” communication (from our Ground Support Equipment computers, GSE in jargon, to the instrument), and “downlink” data reception. However, the hang test is very much supposed to happen outdoors, preferably on a clear blue sky day, the sun majestically shining upon our little solar panels, bits flying to and fro, flawlessly reaching the satellites, us cheering in the back: “Weeeeeeee!” “Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!” goes the crowd.
We are hanging in a hangar
Well that did not really happen…the weather was not being cooperative, with storms and high winds in the horizon, our shipping deadline looming ahead like a Damocles sword. So we hung inside (total weight of our gondola: 940 lbs), tested the telemetry inside and outside (not hanging), and scrutinize the cloud to test our solar panel at every pitiful ray of sunshine that would dare show its face. The broken up test was enough to convince us that everything functioned properly, but would it suffice for CSBF to believe we were indeed flight ready?
The suspense was building up, but we had no time to waste, left the instrument as is on the gondola, and started the painstaking process of packing and listing all of our equipment.
In the meantime, Pierre-Simon and myself also took a day off and drove to Austin, to satiate Roger’s curiosity about arcane state legislature. Incidentally, it also happened to be the Austin half-marathon that day, which would definitely explain all the limping people in leggings we saw.
Glamour shot: Roger and the Texas State Capitol
Allow me to wallow just a tad in the very fresh nostalgia I feel for Palestine, a place we did not necessarily expect to enjoy much. Goodbye Palestine, goodbye to the gentle hum of your freight trains, the ground shaking ever so slight at each passage, goodbye oversize pick-up trucks and drive-through liquor stores. Goodbye charming red bricks and dark alleys, goodbye big strong men of CSBF, goodbye PMC-Turbo, and goodbye to you too, abandoned carcass on the side of the road who has not moved a iota since we got here, blessing us (I’d like to imagine) with the kind, dead, stare of your skeleton every morning on our way to work. You’ve all been good to me.
So here we are now: all packed up, sea container closed, and ready to go. And if the reality of the conclusion of our odd, short life takes a bit to sink in, there is always NASA to remind me that, in their eyes, I no longer exist…
Yallah, talk to you soon, next stop: Sverige!
-Sarah
Palestine, TX, Days 28-31
Hi all, it’s Sarah from the hangar (not to be confused with Lucy from accounting, or Jenny from the block).
I left you last time right at the start of our thermal vacuum test, on Thursday. Good news is, everything went as planned. To summarize: we placed our instrument in its shell, in the Bemco chamber, alongside all the telemetry equipment and battery boxes. At all times, we are monitoring pressure and temperature inside the shell, outside it, inside the belly band (a sort of belt made of pink panther insulating Fiberglas, that sits between the top and bottom shell). Every 10 minutes, we write down what these values are. Even more information is also being recorded by our data acquisition software MIPFlit.
AESOP-Lite thermal vac summary plots, courtesy of Pierre-Simon
After a little while, we pump the air out, and the pressure reaches below 2 mmHg in the chamber, we then back fill it with nitrogen and start cooling down to -40C for 2 hours (we won’t be seeing such extreme temperature gradients in flight, thankfully). We stop cooling, vacuum again, fill it with Nitrogen, and heat up the chamber to +40C this time. After another couple of hours, we run one last vacuum cycle, fill it with air again, and call it quits.
A wise man once told me: “the best thing about a thermal vac. test is the anticipation” (the scope of my philosophical musings has been a tad limited lately).
That maxim turned out to be true, I’ve lived greatest thrills than recording numbers for hours. We took shifts and ate candy all day.
Pierre-Simon’s notions of equal Swedish fish pay seem to be off…
Today February 12th marks the one month of our presence in Palestine, and our time here is drawing to an end, as we get ready for our hang test.
Now that we passed that important step and with a week in change left, we are very close to our final integration compatibility test. The solar panels need to be tested with the instrument, and a few remaining cables will be made. And, then, we wait for a sunny (or at least non-rainy day), and we haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang. More later…
Because last post did not have any time lapses, I give you two!
[wpvideo KYyl0tgs]
[wpvideo fKnEwW0h]
Palestine, TX, Days 23-27
Greetings friends. The past few days were quite eventful. If every blog post were titled like an episode of Friends (how I wish we started it this way), I would name it: “The One with The Mardi Gras Parade On A Saturday, Superbowl Sunday, And Unbearable Thermal Vacuum Wait”.
On the “Life” front, we all got to enjoy our first almost full weekend. The town of Palestine had its annual Mardi Gras Parade on Saturday, and we didn’t want to miss on some fun-loving, local cheer.
My mental image of Texas, aligned with reality
Despite the ominous clouds and relative cold, people came en masse to enjoy having beads and candy thrown at them. Spotted amidst the colorful carnival: two high school marching bands, big men wearing a fez driving tiny cars, a dog painted green, young girls riding horses.
Sunday was the Superbowl, and while I usually enjoy to emphasize my contrarian ways on this day, this one was kinda special, considering all of the UDel folks (namely, 75% of our team), are lifelong Eagles fan, Philadelphia being the closest big city over. A few of us made our way to a bar (did you know you can still smoke indoors in bars in TX?), and Brian’s enthusiasm fast spread to all of us. The Eagles won, which inspired Paul to show a dash of creativity in the latest version of our data acquisition software.
Spot The Eagles fan
Back to work on Monday, great things awaited us: we finally moved the instrument into the half-shell, and it’s always a fun day when you get to play with CSBF power tools. After one last pressure leak test of the in-flight setup (it passed), we closed off the shell. At last, we were ready for the thermal vac. test.
Moving the instrument, slowly, slowly, slowly
Early Tuesday morning, the rigging team came, forked our little egg of an instrument, and brought it over to the Bemco, an environmental chamber and space simulator. Our detector will go in there to be tested to a simulated vacuum and a variation of temperature going from (- 40C to +30C, we have heaters inside to maintain room temperature ), but all of CSBF telemetry and power supplies too. We attached the belly band Matt and I had made to the shell (an insulating foam to keep the temperature from dropping in flight).
The thermal vac is supposed to take 8 hours at least, and we might do two runs to avoid subjecting our trackers to too high temperatures (one run for CSBF, one for us). It’s Wednesday Feb. 7th this morning, and we are about to start, time to get off the computer and start freaking out too.
AESOP-Lite in the Bemco chamber. Sleep well my angel
–Sarah
Palestine, Texas Day(s) 19-22
Hello, world. If you could have guessed from the gaps in the blog’s publication, Matt is now gone, and I am taking over. As a memento, he left us a couple of beers, and about a thousand Q-tips… You shall be missed Matthew. Oh, and Paul also left.
The past week has been spent getting ready for the thermal vac. test, which could happen imminently, John keeps on assuring me. The half-shell now sits on the gondola, along with the MIP (Micro Instrument Package) that CSBF engineers have been integrating, which will allow for the science to communicate to ground, sending commands data up and down.
Our gondola consolidating…
Our efforts this week were focused on mundane yet necessary work on calibrating the instrument’s PHA and barometers to check for linearity in their response (they are).
Pierre-Simon and myself tested the accuracy of the two barometer’s readout, comparing the pressure value given by the software with the Paroscientific barometer we have
T3 scintillator PHA calibration
I also carried out more pressure leak rate test on all the connections (altimeter 1, altimeter 2, check valve, shell feed through): the idea to get an estimate on how long our shell could sustain a inside pressure of 1 atm (14.7 psi) without much leakage (1 psi lost over a 5 day flight would be a concerning scenario).
Looks reasonable to me…
The individual component check serves as a diagnosis on their level of potential damage. They seem to be alright…per my rough estimate, we can fly for 302 days before the pressure in our shell would drop by 1 mmHg (1 atm = 760 mmHg, are you getting lost with all these units? I am.)
Some officials from NASA Wallops paid us a visit (including Debbie Fairbrother, head of the Balloon Programs), and thus we were kindly ask to clean up our hangar. I felt like a young kid at school, with the principal coming to our classroom. It feels great to spend 12 hours in a clean lab now. Check out the time lapse to convince yourself how efficient the carrot-and-the-stick method can be.
[wpvideo XvswtiVj]
–Sarah
Palestine, Texas Day 18
Today, day 18 in Palestine, is my last day reporting to the hangar. Tomorrow I fly back to Delaware to prepare for my classes that start next week. That means this will be my last blog entry. Sarah will take over the blog in my absence. Since I really don’t want to write an entry at the airport tomorrow, I will keep a live feed of sorts that I will try to update throughout the day.
9:30 am – Brian and I arrive to John, Paul, and James already at work. Pierre-Simon and Sarah arrive immediately after.
10:00 am – I test GSE 3 and 4 again, still no data stream coming through; I hand the task over to Brian because this issue was unexpected and he has more experience in this field. James is working on flight cables. Sarah is coding software tools, as is Paul.
10:15 am – Pierre-Simon noticed something weird with our data from the PHA calibration we did two days ago. Specifically, the numbers from the auxiliary board don’t look right. We begin re-testing the auxiliary board.
11:15 am – it looks like the auxiliary board or has a lower gain than the rest of the boards. The numbers are still linear, but on a different scale. Pierre-Simon is analyzed the data we acquired to confirm. After, he began analyzing the data from last night’s run. He’s letting out groans of despair occasionally, that’s how I know it’s not looking good. Brian is still troubleshooting the data stream for GSE 3 and 4.
John, Paul, and Pierre-Simon mid-discussion
12:30 pm – It’s almost time for lunch and my stomach knows it. James is still doing work on flight cables. Pierre-Simon, Paul, and John are testing the PMT of the LEE calorimeter using the oscilloscope. They are not getting the exact results they expected and are discussing why that is and how they can amend it. Brian has GSE 3 correctly receiving the data stream, but not GSE 4.
1:30 pm – Brian, Pierre-Simon, James, Sarah and I went to Taqueria San Luis for lunch in Bread Baker Chris’s recommendation. Easily best Mexican food we’ve had while down here.
3:00 pm – Pierre-Simon, Sarah, and I rummaged through the sea crate to find Jame’s Raspberry Pi that we slipped our minds while unpacking. While we did this, he worked on flight cables.
4:30 pm – Pierre-Simon is improving the Monte Carlo simulation of the strips detector that Sarah worked on. Brian finally got a data stream flowing through GSE 4, but his work with it is not done. James is still working on flight cables. Paul installed another round of custom upgrades to MIPFlit.
Sarah and I making tubing
5:15 pm – I helped Sarah set up tubing on the altimeters so that the pressure leak rate of the instrument can be monitored and tested in flight. Paul began the process of installing Visual Basic to our spare computer.
6:30 pm – Brian gave me a short Netcat tutorial to set the port forward. End day.
[wpvideo ysB4MmlZ]
-Matt Collins
Palestine, Texas Day 17
I took day 17 in Palestine off. So did Brian, John, Sarah, and Pierre-Simon. This means we have no pictures were taken of the hangar during the day, however we can assume James and Paul threw a massive party.
The main events of said party were flight cables and coding. James kept setting up flight cables and electronics on the gondola. Paul continued updating, testing, debugging, and re-configuring his software. The list of tasks he accomplished are as follows:
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- Updated MIPFlit (one of his software tools)
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Default baud rate of 19.2, buffer flush rate adjusted to allow full parameter dumps at 19.2
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Final cleanup of the new parameter reads (temperatures and currents), and possible implementation of additional ones.
I mostly slept, so that will be all for the blog for this day.
[No time lapse either, sorry]
-Matt Collins
Palestine, Texas Day 16
The sixteenth day in Palestine was Paul’s birthday! Unfortunately, the celebration was short. Sarah and Pierre-Simon bought birthday cupcakes, so as soon as they arrived in the morning we all sang happy birthday and had cupcakes for Paul. That was the end of the fun. The rest of the day was fairly dull.
The birthday boy celebrating by doing work
Everyone hard at work (Sarah is hiding behind Pierre-Simon)
I’ve definitely overused the word continued over the course of writing this blog, but here we go again. Brian continued working on making sure the data stream was flowing from GSE computer to GSE computer. John continued filling out documents. Sarah continued coding new software analysis tools and worked with the vacuum pump cart. Pierre-Simon continued monitoring and analyzing test data. I continued working on the website and configuring the GSE 3, GSE 4, and another spare computer. From California, Robert continued analyzing data with Pierre-Simon and Paul, looking for any anomalies among the test runs that could explain any pre-existing problems. Paul continued editing his software tools to make them up to date with the needs of AESOP-Lite and John. James continued setting up all the electrical equipment on the gondola. For the most part, our work continued and continued and continued. Everyone besides James spent their day staring at a computer screen. The only break from the monotony of the day was another form of monotony. Pierre-Simon and I put in more time calibrating the PHA. This involved turning a knob, pressing a few buttons on the computer, and repeat. It fit perfectly with the theme of the day.
[wpvideo iSp29p8E]
-Matt Collins