Author: Administrator

JPA is crowd sourcing through Kickstarter to fund the September 2014 PongSat mission. We will be flying 2000 PongSat student experiments. We need your help to make it happen. Clink the link and check it out!

Last night we continued sewing frame sleeves on the Ascender 26. The team also repackaged our main flight controller into the Ascender 26 configuration. We did two shock tube firings, both at mach 2.2 and lastly we flipped over the submarine in order to mount the magnetic drop weight system.

We’ve reached over Mach 3 in our shock tube. We were shooting for conducting our tests at the mach 3 level, however it’s going so well we’re going to try for mach 4.

The Ascender 26 airship is moving forward in leaps. We’ve built a external stiffener frame out of carbon tubing. We did an inflation last weekend to verify it’s position.

The hypersonic shock tube is progressing in leaps and bounds (or should I say waves?). We redesigned the sensors and are now getting much cleaner output. Last Saturday we reached mach 2.4. As soon as we’re over mach 3 we will start the active drag reduction tests.

We’ve updated the Airship to Orbit pdf. On our website we have an brief overview of Airship to Orbit. It covers the basic idea, some diagrams of the orbital airship and pictures of project milestones. It was getting a little out of date so we gave it an overhaul. Check it out!

http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf

Link to the news article.

Here the link to the press announcement.

6.01 volts, that’s what we hit on Saturday. For the last two years on the Magnetohydrodynamic development program our goal has been to achieve a 5000 millivolt (5 volt) system. Our first couple of dozen tests were in the 30 millivolt range. Saturday’s test number 105 blew past our goal and nailed 6010 milivolts! We’ve now officially ramping up for the 10 volt system.

This is from our Away 88 mission last year. There are 10 MiniCube spaces left for the upcoming April 26th flight.