= 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
= Design =
=  Setup  =


The experiment consists of three units. Supikoira flight computer 2 (SFC2), Inertial Measurement Unit 2 (IMU2) and the Experiment Digital Camera (EDC). The SFC2 will record inertial measurement data from IMU2 and images from the EDC. IMU2 data will be recorded to onboard memory and the images will be recorded on external SD memory card. 
=  Communication  =


SFC2 and IMU2 will be communicating over MIL-STD-1553 Bus. SFC2 and EDC will be communicating over Ethernet and a couple of digital IO lines. SFC2 will be also communicating to the ground station via radio uplink and downlink provided by the REXUS rocket. The REXUS communication is going over RS-422 serial link. 
=  Software  =


Software consists of three distinct parts:

''' 1. SFC2 software'''

 *  Operating system: RTEMS
 *  HW drivers (UART, Clock, Timer, RTC, SD/MMC, MIL-STD-1553, Ethernet)
 *  Navigation software
 *  Logging
 *  MIL-STD-1553 bus controller
 *  Camera control
 *  Uplink/Downlink
 *  HW drivers written in C, other software in Ada95

'''2. IMU software'''

 *  Measures accelerations, angular velocities and sensor temperatures.
 *  Does sensor error compensation.
 *  Does integration of inertial measurements
 *  MIL-STD-1553 remote terminal
 *  Written in C

'''3. Ground software:'''

 *  Flight visualization
 *  Logging
 *  Written in Python/C/Ada95

With the exception of MIL-STD-1553 driver, software is developed on Embedded Artists LPC2468 prototyping board, while waiting for the actual hardware to finish. Navigation algorithms are prototyped with Python / Numpy, before implementation in Ada95.
=  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.