"The accomplishment is even more impressive considering that a majority of the UAH team members were new to the competition," said SHC AutoSat program manager and project lead, Louis McEvoy.
"Among the 27 competing team members, 85% were first-year freshmen whose only prior knowledge was a SHC two-month training program they participated in at the start of the year. They're competing against primarily upperclassmen and graduates from other countries, and knowing that we fell short of first place internationally by a margin of only 0.3%, we're pretty proud of that," McEvoy added.
A CanSat is a type of rocket payload used to teach students space technology. The 2024 mission simulates a space probe entering a planetary atmosphere. Each CanSat contains electronics, a hen's egg to simulate a delicate instrument, and a detachable heat shield, as well as sensors for tracking altitude, internal temperature, battery voltage, and GPS position. The egg must survive without breaking through all phases of flight.
CanSats are launched to a maximum altitude of 725 meters, measuring the speed of the rocket during ascent and of the CanSat itself during descent. At an altitude of 100 meters, the CanSat releases the aero-braking heat shield and simultaneously deploys a parachute to reduce the descent rate to less than 5 meters/sec.
The competition took place over four days in Staunton, Va., with each team attending a preflight briefing, putting their hardware through a Flight Readiness Review, and flying their projects at the competition's launch site.
Organized by the American Astronautical Society (AAS), the annual event supports a student design-build-launch competition for space-related topics. Students participate in a hands-on end-to-end life cycle of a complex engineering project, from conceptual design, through integration and test, concluding with the actual operation of the system and post-mission summary and debrief.
"Our CanSat teams each scored over 98% of the possible points to be earned in highly technical design reviews presented to the competition judges," McEvoy noted. "Throughout the competition, the UAH teams worked their butts off. And each of these teams could not do what they are doing without the support of their university."
The Space Hardware Club is the largest student group on the UAH campus, comprising nearly 300 students. The SHC AutoSat program is a subset of the group that deals primarily with autonomous payloads and vehicles.
Related Links
CanSat Competition
Microsat News and Nanosat News at SpaceMart.com
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