We are in!

Good news! Our team was selected to participate in the national stage of this year’s CanSat Competition. Last week, Ms. Pető Mária, our team’s coordonating teacher, attended the introductive workshop for teachers and mentors at Timișoara.

This year we have a more complex minisatelite (in comparison to last year’s). This time we have chosen two secondary missions for more reasons:

 

The first one is that with these missions we can collect detailed information about the investigated location from different perspectives. The other reason is the risk factor related to the possible technical malfunctions. If we have independent systems, we can minimise the risk of complete device failure, and this way we may be able to carry out at least one of the experiment using one of the several subsystems.

 

The first objective is measuring UV radiation intensity and concentration of the flammable gases, smoke and the carbon-dioxide. The gas sensors used for these measurements have a rather high power consumption, therefore they shall be stopped after the landing.

 

The second objective consists in launching a rover which shall examine the quality of the soil. With this mission we wish to model the methods of investigating a newly discovered planet or asteroid. The data acquired from these measurements, combined with those collected in the air during descent, together with the coordinates provided by the GPS module of CanSat will offer us the possibility to create a numerical image, a map, about the examined location. We will be able to determine if the location is suitable for inhabiting or if there had existed some time any form of life, which would be grounds for further investigations. We have the intention to try and find a correlation between UV radiation intensity and temperature together with atmospheric pressure. The measuring of the UV radiation intensity will be active both before and after the landing. The values of the UV index from the air and at the level of the soil have a different, separate, scientific base.

The primary mission, obligatory for every team, remained the same as it had been in the last years: measuring temperature and atmospheric pressure during descent.