PongSats

The address to send PongSats to is:

JP Aerospace
2530 Mercantile Dr. Suite I
Rancho Cordova, CA 95742

note: it's Suite (eye)

The Launch date for the Away 26 mission is March 12th. So your'll need to get any PongSats your working on to us as soon as you can before then.

JP

http://www.jpaerospace.com

Thanks for the address information. I'll have our space-mold experiment mailed to you guys as soon as possible. Out of curiosity, has anyone else expressed interest in flying a pongsat with the xprizenews.org group?

One PongSat signed, sealed and delivered by hand to JP Aerospace at Saturday's work session. My vintage L-5 pin will (hopefully) fly to 180,000 feet on JPA's Away 26 high-altitude balloon mission March 12, and (hopefully) be recovered that day or the next. They haven't lost a PongSat yet and they've apparently braved hungry wolf packs in the snow to recover their packages. Most PongSats are more serious than sentimental. One junior high student's experiment will record temperature measurements throughout the flight.

Younger students like to send up jellybeans and miniature marshmallows. At 180,000 feet it's almost vacuum, so the marshmallows puff up and the jellybeans out-gas and change from smooth and shiny to rough and bumpy. Inspired, I packed another ping-pong ball with conversation candy hearts: PAX, ESPERA and AMIGO engraved in sugar. My hypothesis is that candy hearts will survive the rigors of near space better than jellybeans and miniature marshmallows.

Cool. I PMed jpowell about the pongsat offer the day it was first proposed, and got the ticket on pongsat #1778. On behalf of the North Canyon High School Engineering Club the pongsat will contain a piece of bread with a control piece remaining on the ground back at home. The idea is to see whether exposure to near-vacuum and high ultraviolet radiation will destroy mold colonies in garden-variety bread. Now that I think about it I might want to include some object of sentimental value as well (hmmm...).

To any JP Aerospace members: do you reccomend sealing a pongsat with an adhesive such as epoxy glue in order to ensure that the ball remains whole during the flight? I seem to remember the user's guide reccomending something like duct tape, but it seems to me that epoxy might create a more snug fit, although it would necesitate cutting the bal again to get at the experiment. Any thoughts?

I have a pongsat experiment idea:
what happens when you explode something at high altitude?
A stick of dynamite and a detonator is in the mail. Tell me what happens.

JPers: change the name of the 'pongsats'. They should really be called . . .
(drumroll . . .)
SPACEBALLS!
(a la' Mel Brooks)

Time out. Lets not even joke about mailing explosive. The Post Office takes it all VERY seriously as they should.

JP

Whoops. Sorry, guys, but I wasn't able to send my pongsat by earlier this week, so I figured that it would be better to sit this away out and go for the next one. Besides, this way I can actually get everyone to sign the ball. In any case, I'll go through the normal application process for a pongsat experiment and try to send it in for the next mission. Good luck on the launch this weekend!

Your timing worked out OK. We had to delay the Away 26 mission. I'll post more info soon. However, basicly a couple of the systems were not flight ready in time to meet the launch go deadline.

JP