Team JPA is rolling to the desert with Away 100 and Away 101. Heading up to the black with a flowers,a Bonsai and team of artists and film folks from Japan. Wish us luck!
Category: Uncategorized
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Shock Tube Upgrade
Mach 4 anyone? The newest upgrades on our hypersonic wind tunnel (shock tube) are ready for round one testing.
The shock tube will be used for active drag reduction studies.
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Multiple Vehicle Operations
For the last year we’ve been putting multiple vehicles in the air at once. This have given us lots of new operational capabilities. We videoed one vehicle from another, even seeing a balloon burst from a miles away. We can relay commands between vehicles and coordinate landing sites.
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New Nozzle for the Hypersonic Shock Tube
We just received the new nozzle for the shock tube from the 3D print house. We designed it but it needed laser lithographic instead of conventional printing so we had it printed by Shapeways. The shock tube runs at mach 2.2 now. The new nozzle will get it to Mach 3. After that we’re putting an expansion chamber on the end that will get it running at Mach 4.
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Three Flights, Lots of Research
On May 4th we flew three high altitude missions. We carried 800 PongSat student experiments and ten MiniCube payloads. We also conducted ATO engine and flight control experiments and telemetry experiments.
All the flight went really well. One balloon didn’t go as high as we wanted but we still exceeded all the mission objectives.
Here’s the altitudes:
Away 97: 98,944 feetAway 98: 67,011 feetAway 99: 103,337 feetIt took a couple of days but all vehicles were recover safe and sound. Nearly 900 people had experiments, projects or some kind of payload aboard the three flights.
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Off to the Desert
The team is heading out to Northern Nevada in just a few minutes. We are conducting three balloon flights to 100,000 feet. There are PongSats, MiniCubes, two Magneto-hydrodynamic tests on board along with several additional Airship to Orbit experiments. First lift off is Sunday morning at 7am.
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Kickstarter Success!
We made our Kickstarter goal!!!!!
Thank you everyone for supporting PongSats!!
We have 19 hours to go. Can we push it up even higher?
John
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569698176/2000-student-projects-to-the-edge-of-space
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The Talking PongSat!
STEM Nation just sent me a link to a great PongSat video they made. It’s great! It will make you smile.
