10, 9, 8, ..., ,1, FIRE!

Oh, yeah! Our CanSat’s still all alive and working! The launch has happened: we’ve got our data and managed to recover our device.  The butterflies from our stomach are gone now, we are sitting (and freezing) in the tent put up for us and are analyzing our results.  Some are still waiting for the launch of their mini satelite, others are repairing the CanSats. Luckily, nothing’s gone wrong with our device.  The parachute opened properly, our flight time (165 seconds)was within the limits and there’s not even a scratch on the CanSat. Even the sticker my brother’s designed remained almost intact. The data we received is pretty nice: temperature’s all right, pressure’s graph is close to the exponential  function it should be and the dust density values are mostly above 0.

It’s been such an exciting day! We had a pre-flight meeting with safety instructions and status reports from the team captains.
You know, as in: 

-          Team 1? Ready for launch!

-          Team 2? Ready

-          Team 3? OK.

-          Team 4? (that’s us!) CanSat’s ready to fly

-          ...

-          Team 14? We’re ready.

Benny Lysjord, the responsible for launch operations explained to us the countdown procedure: they start countdown at T - 20 (twenty minutes before launch), informing air traffic control about their intention to launch, then check a whole bunch of stuff and at T-5 they close the roads. Then there’s the all too well-known final countdown: ten, nine, eightm six, ..., one, fire!

Two little dots... (in a galaxy) far, far away

There’s so much to say and so little time! Anyway, today’s been  full of excitement and we really feel like we caught a glimpse of this whole thing. Mission’s accomplished and now we’ll just have to draw our conclusions and prepare the final presentation the data received.