What’s Happening at JPA

Eventually everything finds its way home.

A little over a week ago I got a call from a rancher in Nevada. They had found some gear in the desert with our name on it. It was a couple of cameras and batteries. I could not figure out what it was. The site was about 100 miles away from the long lost Away 6 mission. They dropped it all in a box and a few days later it was here.

In the box was a camcorder, a digital still camera, a custom battery pack and a small board with a basic stamp on it. It has our stickers on it, but it still didn’t make any sense. Away 6 had film cameras not digital. The only two unaccounted for vehicles were the stolen Away 34 and the Mesospheric Explorer. However, the equipment didn’t match either vehicle. Also was the problem of where was the rest of it. There were no decks, carbon poles or other structure, just some very weathered squares of foam core.

I pulled the memory card out of the camera and dumped it to my laptop. 940 identical images of a tree, bush and patch of desert. It appears that the camera reset on impact. Turning to the camcorder I popped in a new battery and pressed the eject. The tape ejected like it was new. I dropped it into a newer camcorder and rewound and pressed play.

Away 22
Away 22, Ascender propeller test.

This was a very successful mission that had a bit of an adventure on landing. It was carried aloft by six balloon. It descended for a “soft” landing riding three balloons down. We tracked it all the way to touchdown. It landed hard on a ridge. When we got to the landing site, the propeller and motor were there, but the rest of the vehicle was gone. Without the weight of the motor and prop it had taken off again. Only this time with a dead telemetry system.

Away 22 was found a few days later by a power line crew in a very remote area two hundred miles away from the original landing site. Everything was there except the camera and camcorder. I’ve always thought the line crew kept them, they were innocent after all. The impact on the ridge had popped the lids of the insulated boxes open. Between the first and second landing sites the vehicle tipped open and dumped the cameras in the desert.

Unfortunately the tape only shows to about 70,000 feet. The testing was at 80,000 feet. All the flight and test data is still just from the transmitted data and video. There are still some great scenes though. While Away 22 was climbing we spun up the prop a few rotations every few through feet. This was just keep the motor from freezing up. I’ll have a highlights video up in a couple of days. For now here’s some stills off the video.

The current posts are there but access to anything earlier is broken. I’m must say, I’d rather be working on spacecraft than troubleshooting blog code.

The ability to update the blog has been down for a few weeks now. It ended up taking a reinstall, but all seems to be working.

A lot has happened over the last few weeks. I’ll be posting and getting everybody caught up in short order.

There has been some confusion about what vehicle is what. Away 28 was flown a couple of years back. This is the vehicle the Sacramento State University engineering students are upgrading for there senior project.

Away 38 is the next new vehicle that we are preping to fly. We’re going to fly both vehicle at the same time in near future. To that end both craft have been getting a lot of work.

“Floating to Space” got a review in April’s “Spaceflight” magazine!

Last Wednesday we did balloon fill training. We always do this with a small, three foot balloon and helium. This provides feedback on how well it was done my measuring the lift in the balloon compared with the intended fill. After three fills with the small balloon and one with a bigger balloon is was apparent that something was amiss. All the fills were off by the exact same factor. This means only one thing. Time to recalibrate the fill meter. That all day task was done on Saturday, (it must be done over and over again to verify a stable meter). On the plus side it was one of the best fill training session we’re had in a while.

Saturday also featured camera rebuilding,deck mounting, and telemetry system layout work. Were now close enough to the Away 38 mission that work on all project not related to the upcoming flight are on hold.

  

Or so it seems. This year is our 30 anniversary. I’m still hoping to make a big deal about it, however, there’s barely enough time to keep up with the present!

Here’s some pics from “A Long Time ago”:

This is the frame and port propeller of the 175 foot long Ascender.

Inside the Ascenders nylon shell.

This is my son Aubrey taking a landing site picture of Away 9 while the Away 9 vehicle is taking a picture of him. This is from May 2002.

This is from Away 9 camera about 40 minutes before the above shot.

Saturday we had a pretty big crowd all building, gluing, soldering and coding. Here’s what was happening:

The new reel has been assembled had two sets of carbon brackets mold on the sides. These will hold the braking system. This new reel has duel brakes and a longer drag ladder than the original. We also make the new hub.

The next to last seam reinforcement went on to the Ascender test rib. Eighteen inches to go and it will be ready for a pressure test.

The team finished a second pair of mini rocket launch boxes. The first pair are for testing. They only last for one launch. The new pair will be for flight.

We’ll be flying two HD video cameras on the next flight. We began working on camera alignment. One camera will be focused on the launch boxes, the other on the flight path.

We’re controlling several move events on Away 38 than on a standard mission. We went back and forth on whither to use a seperate event controller and connect it to the the main controller through a serial port (this is how it’s done on the Tandem Airship), or just extend the main controller with a daughter board. The daughter board won. We cot it build last week and Saturday the systems team wrote the code for it and tested and debugged it. This took a little longer than usual, someone who shall remain nameless (yours truly), put in all three transistors backwards…….

Getting new carpet is just like moving. Your world goes into boxes and chaos ensues. It didn’t help that the old carpet came out over a week before the new went in. Workman have been in the shop all week, fixing the roll up doors in the bays, putting in a hot water heater and repairing a whole list of things. Are you sitting down? They’re even coming in next week to fix the air conditioning.
I agreed to sign the new building lease only when all the promised maintenance and upgrades had been done. I think the building owner really needed us to stay. Sometimes a recession has its upside.

We’re been experimenting with different antenna configurations for the small test quad engine.  It’s been waaay too much fun making gas glow. We were patterning our initial experiments after some recent big university experiments. It wasn’t working out to well so we started tweaking and adjusting. We now getting the same results at 35 watts that they were getting at 300.