Today at roughly 00:45 the gondola has landed. Now it is time to wait for the recovery team to bring brack the gondola. It is expected to arrive on Saturday. Till then we are enjoying the remaining days here at Esrange Space Center.

All systems are operating as they should!  We already received lots of data and still 1.5 hour left till gondola cut-down and descent phase.

• Temperature outside -68°C
• Altitude 27.4 km
• Ground speed 70 km/h

One hour until launch! Fingers crossed! Take a look at esrange.insupport.se for a live webcam.

Yesterday we succesfully performed a ‚Flight Interference Test‘ together with experiments from TamaOS, Tormes 2.0 and GranaSAT all on the same balloon gondola.
Today, a ‚Flight Capabiliy Test‘ with the gondola attached to the launch vehicle will follow. First launch opportunity might be tomorrow afternoon.

See the websites of the other teams on our gondola:
TamaOS: http://www.tamaos.de/
Tormes 2.0: http://www.tsc.upc.edu/tormes/
GranaSAT: http://granasat.ugr.es/

Day 3 of experiment preparation.
The experiment is ist mounted onto the balloon gondola and working correctly. Some more tests in the real technical flight-environment follow today. First launch opportunity is on Wednesday.

First day of the Launch Campaign, time to check on our experiment.
With a very increased heart rate we opened our experiment box and saw….

…

everything is ok 🙂

We have arrived at Esrange Space Center for the BEXUS Launch Campaign.

This time we had problems with the flights, too. But yesterday in the late evening we made it with over an hour of delay. Thankfully we started the next day day with a very good breakfast 🙂

Tomorrow we will travel to the Esrange Space Center for this years BEXUS Launch Campaign.
After a whole year of work on our experiment the time has finally come.
Hopefully the experiment arrived in time.

We can proudly announce that we successfully completed all necessary tests and that we were even able to improve the experiment in the process.

The experiment showed full functionality under the expected environmental conditions during the flight and is now ready for the launch campaign in early october.

Setup of thermal vacuum test

Dieter Bischoff (l) and Torsten Lutz (r) inspecting the boards

Today Dieter Bischoff and Torsten Lutz from ZARM visited us here in Kiel for our IPR.

We showed that the electronic and the mechanical parts of our experiment are proceeding well and are even partly finished and ready for assembly. In a tour through our institute we also visited our test facilitys with an ongoing test of our preamp-board.

We were also happy to present our brand new SSDs that arrived last week.