Team Prometheus/Ardusat

Building the 433Mhz Helical antenna for telemetry using the 3D Robotics radio modems and the Ardupilot (Arduloon) from DIY Drones and the Mission Planner as ground control for the Ardusat mission.
An article about the antenna:
http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs ... al-antenna
Team Prometheus will be streaming the launch LIVE! To the internet at: http://www.livestream.com/teamprometheus
Live video of the launch, mission control and live streaming video from the payload. Live telemetry including Spectrometer, giger counter, H2 sensor and much more!
Launch scheduled for September 22nd 2012.

The team welcomes Jeroen Cappaert and Joel Spark of Nanosatisfi to the "Rocket Ranch" in Lampasas, Texas for the launch Jeroen arriving from Belgium and Joel from Germany Jeroen arrived yesterday Joel arriving today.

Monroe,

How did your balloon launch go yesterday? It was a great day for launching a balloon -- clear skies and low wind. I'm looking forward to reading your mission report.

Dave

Our helium bottle was empty- I guess the valve leaked and we had no way to get anymore on short notice due to the helium shortage! I had no idea it was that bad! We had another bottle in Dallas when it was checked it was also empty. We tried to get Hydrogen it was Friday the brakes on the truck where out we tried to get them fixed to run to Burnet, Tx to get the only bottle of H2 we could find (250 cft) we didn't make it before closing. Everyone gave up then Larry in Fort Worth offered his bottle of He but by then it was just too late.
Right now Stew and I are pulling out the old Hydrogen making apparatus we designed a couple of years ago and are going to make the plans available for everyone. We will not be using helium again as many years ago I said it was a nonrenewable resource and it turned out to be a fact.
NSE-14 will be rescheduled. Perhaps I should have not skipped 13

Monroe

Ouch! You really need to start doing a checklist. I think "Get Helium" was the first item we had on the list when we did NSE-5. It can't be that hard to find helium. I just saw a news item on TV yesterday morning about a 12 year old kid that launched a balloon from his back yard in Austin. He has some really nice video that he posted on YouTube.

LOL! Dave we had helium the check list in this case was check bottle. It was full. Just an accident. I'm sure the kid did not have a 3 helical array of 15db antennas and a tracking system for live video and telemetry. Or Quadrfiliar downlink antennas. Or an articulated remote camera on the payload Our tracker is 13 feet tall and it took a great deal of effort to build the mount and the antennas.

Monroe

Edit: Helium is that hard to get! Give it a try. We can get it a lot easier through Aeronautic Enterprises but that's not going to be the case for everyone. We have a CAGE code that allows us head of line privileges but it is still not an overnight affair. There is a REAL shortage of helium.

Your Military have just bought 3 helium airships from a company over here i wonder if that has anything to do with a short term shortage i hope its not long term as there is a lot of medical stuff reliant on He a it it would be nice if Cern could confirm if the Higgs Boson is real or not.

Alex
Yeah, it is long term. The government sold off the reserves it had to keep from spending money on the storage facility (a huge cavern that held 1 Billion cubic meters) And now there is going to be a shortage and a price hike in the long term. I just found out about all this I bought our last bottle in April and the shortage started in May. I tried to tell everyone a long time ago we needed to use Hydrogen and now it's going to be a have too. The shortage is now because all of the reserve is gone. Now we are using what is produced in the making of LPG and that's it. There aint no more than that.

Monroe

Monroe, it took me two phone calls and I found a place that has helium tanks available. You can get a 219 cu ft tank of helium for $157 at Round Rock Welding Supply.

You may want to talk to John Powell about the pros and cons of hydrogen versus helium. JP Aerospace has a lot of experience in launching balloons. He was interviewed about JP Aerospace at the beginning of June, and the videos are posted on line. The video about helium versus hydrogen is posted at http://moonandback.com/2012/06/08/moona ... nd-flying/ .

In the interview, he stated that the cost of special safety equipment and insurance makes hydrogen more expensive than helium for small missions. Of course, this may change over time as the price of helium increases.

Dave there is a helium shortage so glad you got lucky-

Monroe

Your welcome. Now there's nothing holding you back from flying NSE-14. So what's the new mission date?

TBA but pretty soon. We want to beef up the tracker a little so I'm going to the coast tomorrow. I'll be there till Thurs and the following week I'll be down there 4 days. Figure a week after that so in October early November.

Monroe

Monroe, have you rescheduled NSE-14? When are you planning on trying it again? I know you've been tinkering with your tracker for quite a while, so that is slowing you down, but have you finished it?

You know you don't really need a motorized tracker for NSE-14. Once the balloon is a few thousand feet up you shouldn't have to move your antennas much. Probably once every 15 minutes would be sufficient. There's a calculator on the web somewhere that will tell you how to position it given the GPS coordinates of the balloon and the coordinates of your antenna.

The whole point of the tracker is for tracking more than just balloons. Besides that I don't want to fiddle with it being inside mission control in the A/C.
The tracker also has an optical telescope to get a ground view. Also we have remote control on the payload now and we can't be loosing signal or telemetry. Tuesday we are scheduled to drop a UAV from 100k with live video and telemetry as well as remote capability.
I've been pretty busy. Also building a custom 5-axis cnc machine to make some pretty special components.

Monroe

Tuesday should be a nice day for a balloon launch. What kind of UAV are you dropping at 100K? Will it fly at that altitude, or will it drop to a lower altitude before it starts flying? Do you have a web link for the live video? That would be interesting to watch live.

This is the second attempt at the UAV drop. Here is the first attempt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRDoaRfM ... e=youtu.be
We may go on Monday now. This is the APM2.5 going on this launch. Because 3D Robotics sponsors us we are working on Ardurocket code with the prototype 32 bit OS. That code will include cold gas thrusters.
Still just work work work. I am working on a machine to cut gore patterns for the zero pressure balloons we will be switching too. I'm making a few by hand right now for testing. It's slow but steady. I expect it will kick up as spring approaches. We are trying to do at least one launch a month. We have switched to hydrogen gas.
NSE-14 was done in collaboration with Robotrising and we got some awesome panoramas at altitude over Texas like this http://www.360cities.net/image/spectacu ... ,0.00,70.0 I'm working on a new liquid byprop engine too. So yeah I've been plenty busy.

Monroe