Laurier Space Program

One of the Students at Sir Wilfrid Laurier has recently traveled and send this picture in to us to share with u

A test glider made by students at Sir Wilfrid Laurier School🔥

When we came in to school this morning we were hoping that our sensors would still be running and collecting data after operating continuously for the last 60 hours. When we opened the door to the space lab, this is what we saw:Yes – all the condition lights on the sensors were still on – so at least the external USB power supply had not failed during the weekend! Had the indicator lights been off, we would know that the system had rebooted because our software included a manual start command. A reboot would have stopped the test, so this was good news.

The second part of the test was to check to see if the software and sensors would run continuously for 60 hours and still collect data. Again, we needed to check that not only could the sensors run for the full duration of the 14 hour mission, we also wanted to know how the components themselves would cope with being run at 400% of the sample rate we have planned for the mission.

The serial monitor screen used to display collected data showed that our sensors were still collecting data after 60 hours. In fact, they collected a lot of data – 4 million bits of it. This is good news for our data storage requirements on the mission because we can easily store this on a low capacity SD card.The bad news is that trawling through 4000 pages of data is going to take some time and the format we collected the data in makes it difficult to analyze graphically, so we need to fix that before Lightning is shipped off to Montreal, and then on to Sweden, for launch.

We also decided that we need some kind of status display to help the launch technicians in Sweden recognize that Lightning’s systems are all running normally before lift-off. The status lights on the individual sensors are not particularly bright and will be difficult to see in sunlight, so we need to work on a user interface to enable communication with people on the ground.

We did do a quick data sample to see if the barometric pressure sensor was giving us correct readings. By comparing the data collected by the Sleipnir barometer with data from the weather station at Calgary International Airport, we were able to confirm that the Sleipnir pressure sensor was working well. Data from Sleipnir showed the rise and fall of barometric pressure in Calgary as the nice weather on Saturday and Sunday morning gave way to winds and rain on Sunday afternoon.

While it was nice to see our sensors were working well, the change in the weather did ground our Bison glider and mean that we couldn’t run in-flight sensor tests on Sunday afternoon as planned. But then again, rocket science is never easy.

The Engineering Team of LaurierSpace has finally embarked on creating circuits and wiring.

Received pins and stickers from the CSA today! Thank You so much for the unconditional support and effort in our mission CSA!