Author: Administrator

Today was High Rack day. Three are for upcoming PongSat missions and ATO tests and one is for commercial work. Fin mounts and lift points were installed today.

Another great video out of Japan about our Samsung project. Watch for two familiar faces!

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Here is Drew troubleshooting a High Rack before flight while everyone stairs at him. Talk about grace under pressure!

We’re back to the first gen Hall effect MHD unit. In this test we were looking at current with the max battery stack. I think the most dangerous thing we do at the shop is handle these magnets. When stacking and unstacking you wear two layers of gloves. That way when the magnets slip and try and pinch you can spend 15 minutes getting a corner of the glove out from between them instead of a corner of your hand.

Saturday we took the best Faraday MHD unit and mounted it on to our Quad engine. Not long before the first Quad firing. It got delayed with the Samsung commercial and Tandem flight, but we’re going to try and sneak it in while the flying weather is bad.

The Japanese website Gigazine  has some great pics from the Galaxy Space Balloon Cell Phone promotion.

Translated Article

We did the first firing test of the second gen hall effect MHD unit. We got power out but not as much as the best of the 1st generation unit. We are now tweaking and tuning.

New Electrode Core

MHD firing test number 53

The team made great steps forward on 2012 missions. Paul and Ed completed the main truss of the new Tandem and also finished arm one second upper deck structure of Dark Sky Station 3.  Drew preped and reprogrammed the tracking systems for Away 64, 65, 66 and Tandem. Anthony is on the home stretch of programming the new datalogger.

I thought New Years was a holiday!

The team is spending New Years Eve working on the new Tandem airship. I can’t think of a better way to bring in the new year.

Sometimes research and development is just a matter of getting methodical and plowing through. We fixed the problem with the data logger and have run tests 49, 50, 51 and 52. We worked out the ideal number of electrodes on 48,49 and 50. On 51 we introduced offset electrodes into the mix. Test 52 was the configuration we were building up to. It’s call an offset internal frame hall electrode array. That mouthful means the little copper plate don’t lineup with each other. We were pretty surprised when it worked the first time and doubled output of unit 51.

Offset internal frame hall electrode array for MHD 52

and a tiny one back.

We just completed MHD test firing 48.  The data logger showed 5 millivolts across the whole 30 second sampling cycle. It should show zero until the run, about two seconds of power data then zero again. Instead of another firing it looks like this evening will be spend troubleshooting the unit.