BEXUS 6 Teams:

ICARUS:

Icarus

ICARUS Final Report (PDF)

A combined Romanian-Polish research team studies the feasibility of using a lifting body vehicle to recover small to medium experimental payloads from high altitude balloons. A lifting body is an “aerodynamic configuration” where the body itself produces lift. The drag and structure of the wing is minimized for high speed flight (e.g.: re-entry). However a lifting body structure can also be used for recovery of high altitude payloads in low speed flight regime given some changes in the aerodynamics of the entire vehicle. Given the initial high altitude and the low loading of the lifting body, the vehicle can glide for considerable distances bringing the experiments to the ground in a controlled manner and in a controlled area. At the same time the internal volume of a lifting body can be used for several experiments mounted on standard mounts and using standard mechanical/electrical interfaces.
The ICARUAS team believes that this type of vehicle/recovery capability would be of great help to the high altitude scientific community since today the recovery is done by conventional parachutes and the distance between take-off point and recovery point can become quite significant. The flight test will test an experimental lifting body vehicle by radio guiding it back to a pre-determined landing area.

ICARUS Experiment (Photo by SNSB / Roger Schederin)

Team:
Florin Mingireanu (Universitatea Politehnica Bucuresti, Romania)
Kamil Glebowicz (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
Grzegorz Misiolek (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
Grzegorz Wozniak (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)

LowCoINS:

LowCoINS - Low Cost Inertial Navigation System

The peculiarity of an Inertial Navigation System (INS) is that does not require any external reference in order to determine position, orientation, or velocity. INS is the only self-contained navigation system, therefore it is specially suitable for applications on rockets or balloons. Low.Co.I.N.S is a low cost inertial navigation system based on a strapdown design that foresees the use of accelerometers and gyros rigidly connected to the vehicle. Inertial measurements are obtained by MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems )-based motion sensing devices. MEMS technology is improving day over day, and it will probably reach a sufficient level of accuracy in the near future to provide an effective low cost alternative in the production of inertial navigators where extremely high accuracy is not required. The limits of actual MEMS sensors are known and our experiment wants to test those limits trying to find out the maximum performances derivable from using them in extreme environment.

Team:
Paolo Montefusco (Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy)
Emanuele Medaglia (Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy)
Maria Cristina Oliva (Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy)

TURAWIND:

TURAWIND - Turbulence in the Stratospheric Wind Field

TURAWIND and TURATEMP Student Experiment Dokumentation (SED)

Gravity waves and turbulence in the atmosphere play a crucial role in understanding the energy and momentum transfer as well as the trace gas distribution. Breaking gravity waves produce structures in the temperature and wind fields down to the size of turbulence cells. Stratospheric turbulence is therefore very important to comprehend the propagation of gravity waves into the mesosphere and to understand fundamental stratospheric processes.
Within the project TURAWIND we will measure turbulent structures in the horizontal wind field from the ground up to the stratosphere. The measurement principle is based on the air-flow induced cooling of a wire, which is connected to a Wheatstone bridge. Change of the flow velocity will cause voltage variations, which provide information about turbulence.

Team:
Anne Theuerkauf (Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics IAP, Kühlungsborn, Germany)
Olga Suminska (University of Rostock, Germany)
Dörte Petzsch (University of Rostock, Germany)

TURATEMP:

TURATEMP - Turbulence in the Stratospheric Temperature Field

Gravity waves and turbulence in the atmosphere play a crucial role in understanding the energy and momentum transfer as well as the trace gas distribution. Breaking gravity waves produce structures in the temperature and wind fields down to the size of turbulence cells. Stratospheric turbulence is therefore very important to comprehend the propagation of gravity waves into the mesosphere and to understand fundamental stratospheric processes.
Within the project TURATEMP we will study the stratospheric turbulence by measuring the temperature fluctuations. The measurement principle is based on the proportionality between the speed of sound and the square root of the temperature.
To receive the speed of sound or rather the temperature fluctuations we will emit an acoustic signal (e.g. a continuous tone of 3000 Hz) by a signal transducer and receive this signal by a microphone. The emitted signal will undergo a phase delay, which is induced by atmospheric temperature changes. By detecting this phase shift we can determine the fast temperature fluctuations and thus the small scale turbulence.

Team:
Olga Suminska (University of Rostock, Germany)
Anne Theuerkauf (Leibniz Institute of Atmosheric Physics IAP, Kühlungsborn, Germany)

BEXUS 7 Teams:

AURORA:

AURORA - Stratosphere and Magnetic Field Polar Explorer

The main goal of AURORA is to study polar lights phenomena which are characteristic of Kiruna, by measuring physical properties of stratosphere during the flight of BEXUS. Quantities that will be measured and recorded for post flight data analysis are temperature and magnetic field intensity.

Objectives of the mission are to compare data with the ones available from 1976 US Standard model of the atmosphere, and the IGRF model of the magnetic field. The main goal is to obtain a low cost system to sense physical quantities in extremely severe environments, that may find applications in several industries. Experiment is also equipped with a telescope in order to take earth pictures.

The AURORA system is designed to have a low power consumption, and is meant to be low cost. Therefore, the system architecture that has been selected is based on a PC104 embedded computer system, equipped with Commercial Off the Shelf sensors, and a RS-232 serial magnetometer and thermal sensors.

To resist the extremely low temperatures and pressures of the stratospheric flight at Kiruna, AURORA will be equipped with a thermal protection system and to enhance the robustness of the system it will feature a hot redundancy on data storage.

Team:
Adelaide Pecorario (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)
Mary Lettiero (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)
Emiliano Pifferi (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)
Maria Libera Battagliere (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

DOLS:

DOLS - Diversity and Origin of Life in Stratosphere Final Report (PDF)

A manifold of environments on earth host living organisms. Even in seemingly hostile environments like deep sea, eternal ice, the Arctic and Antarctic, or in ground layers of stone below the ocean a surprisingly high biodiversity of adapted microorganisms, mostly bacteria and archaea, could be found. Even more airborne cells of various species (mostly bacteria, fungi, pollen) were found in many places on earth.

There are several organisms that are claimed to be found in the stratosphere and which were successfully cultivated, e.g. penicillinum, bacillus luciferensis, bacillus sphaericus (Griffin, 2004); fungus engyodontium, bacillus aerius sp. nov., bacillus aerophilus sp. nov., bacillus stratosphericus sp. nov., bacillus altitudinis sp. nov. (Wainwright et al., 2003 and Shivaji et al., 2006); and microbacteriaceae, staphylococcus, brevibacterium (Griffin, 2007).

All previous sampling experiments were based on cultivation methods. But only a small fraction (about 0.1%) of the microorganisms can be cultivated in the laboratory. Therefore the DOLS team decided to use an cultivation-free apporach.

Team:
Rainer Engelken (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Felix Becker (Technical University of Dresden, Germany)
Alexander Zakher (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
Helge Dietert
Enriko Jörns
Johannes Engelken (University of Konstanz, Germany)
Annika Penzel ( Martin-Luther University Halle, Germany)
Verena Vogler (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Spain)
Daniela Meisinger (Technische Universität München, Germany)

Stratospheric Census:

Stratospheric Census

Stratospheric Census Final Report (PDF)

The Earth’s stratosphere contains aerosols of various origins, including aerosols of volcanic and cosmic origin. An experiment is designed to collect aerosols in the stratosphere and do a post-recovery analysis. The experiment consists of a pump sucking air through a filter that is able to catch particles down to 0.3μm. It will fly on a stratospheric balloon, launched from Esrange by Eurolaunch in October 2008 as part of the BEXUS 7 campaign. A system of tubes and valves will ensure that no air flows through the filter before or after the balloon reaches floating altitude. Upon recovery, the filters will be collected and analysed using electron microscopy and neutron activation analysis.

Team:
Martin Rudolph (Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden)
Geritt Holl (Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden)
Mark Fittock (Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden)
Martin Siegl (Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden)
Jaroslav Urbář  (Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden)

TimePix:

TimePix@Space

TimePix Final Report (PDF)

The main scientific motivation of using the stat-of-the-art "Detecting device based on hybrid pixel detector of Medipix2/Timepix type developed at CERN with USB interface developed at IEAP CTU in Prague" is its whole new concept of particle imaging and its high portability, which is ultimate solution for real-time Cosmic Rays imaging and particle recognition in the stratospheric environment.

Team:
Jaroslav Urbář (Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden)
Ján Scheirich (Czech Technical University, Dept. of Electric Engineering, Czech Republic)
Daniel Scheirich (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Math&Physics, Czech Republic)
Ilona Urbářová (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Natural Science, Czech Republic)
Eva Plavcová (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Math&Physics, Czech Republic)
Marek Vyšinka (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Math&Physics, Czech Republic)
Jakub Vaverka (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Math&Physics, Czech Republic)