Itikka Experiment, REXUS 5 Sounding Rocket

Experiment Overview

The plan is to design, build and test the flight computer and especially the inertial measurement unit for next generation student rocket project of Castor the Space Club of Tampere University Of Technology. The experiment will be launched in REXUS 5 rocket in March of 2009.

The REXUS 5 sounding rocket is 6 meters long and it's mass is 500kg. It has top speed over 1200 m/s and it will reach the apogee of 100km in less than 3 minutes having peak acceleration of almost 20g.

Castor is the Space Club of Tampere University of Technology. Castor has recently finished Finland's most ambitious student rocket project (Supikoira) which was succesfully launched on 06-09-2008 in Rovajarvi (a military area in Lapland).

REXUS BEXUS is a bilateral German-Swedish cooperation to offer students opportunities to fly their own experiments on sounding rockets and stratospheric balloons. Half of the payload is reserved for German students, while the Swedish half has been made available to students from other European countries through a collaboration with ESA Education.

Objectives

• To test components for Supikoira 2
• To increase accuracy of the Inertial Measurement Unit
• To take the first Finnish images from Space
• To gain positive publicity for space research in Finland and Europe
• To gain valuable experience of space related projects

Results

REXUS 5 was launched at 6:00 UTC at Esrange, Kiruna, Sweden. Apogee of the flight was about 88 km.

The experiment was working nice and it got 89 photos during the flight. Curvature of earth and the black space can be seen from couple of the images. There are also nice photos of clouds.

Team is currently analyzing the inertial data and will update the wiki according the upcoming results.