RockSat-X at Virginia Tech

About

I was the Electrical and Software team lead for an undergraduate research team which sent an experiment into space to test the feasibility of maintaining a tethered connection between a rocket and a small deployable satellite. The tether design would be desireable for high power applications which do not want to fly heavy or unsafe batteries. The biggest problem we tried to address was being able to control the ejection of a satellite so that it could deploy and self stabilize while being affected by the forces applied by the tether.

This was done through the RockSat-X program which is an initiative which allows university teams to send experiements into space each year aboard a sounding rocket. There are limited spots so teams compete in a down selection process by delivering major presentations to the organizers of the program. After a conceptual, preliminary and critical design review, the down selection happens and continuing teams move into implementation and testing.

Motivation

The RockSat-X program is a great way to learn about complex hardware-software interfacing as the space flight environment is unforgiving. I learned so much from being in this program over 3 years (and 3 projects) about embedded software and hardware design.

Technical

To achieve our goals, we put a fly wheel inside of the satelite which would rotate quickly to counter act torques by relying on gyroscopic effects. The wheel speed was always high, but varied some depending on a PID controller which took in IMU data and could react dynamically to rotations. We managed power distribution, wireless communication between the satellite and rocket, motor control systems, timer event handlers, and mechanical integration for this project. Unfortunately both of our cameras on either side failed and the only data we recovered were flight statistics from the onboard sensors we included. However, we have a small video from another team which verifies that our deployer activated correctly.