Hello everyone. Hope you all are staying safe in the wake of this new pandemic around the world. To those who are reading this from your couches, or offices: Welcome to the second post of our blog. If you are a newcomer, you might want to check out our previous blog post to get an idea of our experiment. To our regulars: Welcome back. We hope you missed us. I am Kaushik Iyer and I am going to take you through an interesting journey about our experiment, what our goals are, and how you can follow and support us.
We are B2D2 and we are a team of excited engineers from KTH hailing from various backgrounds and cultures. We have come together for a unique purpose: To fly our experiment on a sounding rocket from the Esrange Launch station in Kiruna, Sweden. As some of you may know, we are participating in the German/Swedish REXUS/BEXUS programme which allows us to achieve this purpose. Along with student teams all over Europe, participation in this programme gives us the unique opportunity to experience a fully-fledged space mission from conceptual development all the way to launch and recovery. Our experiment will be flown on the REXUS 30 rocket in March 2021 and has two objectives: To demonstrate the deployment of a bistable composite boom and to demonstrate high quality measurements of the earth’s magnetic field. The more technical aspects of our experiment will be explained in the coming blogs but to get a rough idea of our experiment works, imagine a measuring tape which you can fold but you can also unfold it without the tape collapsing.
Why are we doing this?- Because we are crazy engineers. We want to experience the feeling of seeing your payload launch on a rocket and perform successfully. As capable as our theoretical knowledge may be, all engineers need to gain some hands-on project knowledge to get a feel of how things actually work. Of course, we also want to gain some integral engineering skills which will be invaluable to us in our future careers.
How will we Achieve our objectives?- With a skilled team of engineers ranging from Mechanical design, manufacturing, testing, electronics and of course- Software. You will get to know our team members and their responsibilities by following our social media pages.
How can you support us?- Keep following our social media accounts. We will be providing weekly updates about our progress in the project, introduce you to our team, and show you some behind the scenes glimpses on a real-world space project.
What's our current status? Our team just came back from an enriching training week in Kiruna, Sweden and we currently are working on updating our experiment to the feedback provided by the expert panel. Unfortunately due to the developing situation of the coronavirus in Sweden, we are forced to work remotely away from campus. But we are focused on keeping our spirits up and do what we can to keep our project on track for the upcoming Critical Design Review in June.
Make sure to check out our website: www.b2d2.se, our Facebook page, and our instagram accounts. Next stop on the B2D2 train: Mechanical Design and Components.
T-12 Months