What’s Happening at JPA

Next on Deck: Ascender Ellipse. This is the first Ascender airship with an elliptical cross section & an all air beam internal structure. It’s just a little one, 26 ft long. It’s for low altitude structural tests. The Ellipse is 70% complete. We hope to fly before years end.

We’re starting to replace the hand made boards on Bellavia (our sub) with PCB’s This one just came in today. It’s the sensor breakout board. It connects an Arduino computer to a whole set of sensors. Kudos to Chris for a great job on board design.

Working the checklist. Away 129 had 75 tasks on the checklist. It was one of our more complex high racks with 4 separate telemetry systems, 5 cameras, data logger, full array of sensors, beacon, in house and student experiments and our standard flight system set.

Final prep before launch. Now we’re down to things like foreign object removal, rigging inspection, balloon sep system power up. Then it’s the final ‘GOs’ from mission control, videographer, traffic, and balloon team.

It’s 5am on launch morning. It’s cold and dark and time for the team briefing. Meeting are actually exciting when you’re in the field and it’s 4 hours to launch.

Twenty PongSat student projects flew on Away 129.

The day before the launch the team arrived at the site and started the unpacking, assembling and laying out the launch bag.