Stardust Stratospheric Balloon Mission!
Aug 21, 2020
Hello everyone!
Sorry for not being active here. I owe you an update on things I’m doing lately!
Two years ago I’ve started studying on Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland where I’ve met a fabulous people from SimLE scientific club. The team and I are working on a balloon system that conducts microbiological research of the stratospheric biome. Basically, it consists of a vacuum pump and a set of syringe filters that filter the stratospheric air. The syringe filters are later checked for presence of microorganisms like bacteria. The purpose of the research is to find the ways the organisms can stay alive in the harsh stratospheric conditions. It is believed that some of the mutations might be useful here on Earth.
The first, pioneer mission of the experiment was conducted in 2018, just before I joined the science club. In the time since though, we have pitched the idea to ESA/DLR/SNSA BEXUS program (Balloon EXpriments for University Students, joint venture of European, German and Swedish space agency) . The idea got through, and right now we plan on launching the experiment from the continental Europe’s only space port - Kiruna, Sweden - later this year!
Exactly a month ago (sorry for not reaching out sooner), we have conducted a test mission of our system before the BEXUS launch, pictures and results of which I want to share with you in this blog post!
In the project I’m responsible for electronics and firmware design. All I’m doing is open source and available on my GitHub, which I’ll link below.
By supporting me on Patreon you help me work on awesome projects such as this! In the meantime I still keep rocket.watch up and running, but I do not have much time to work on new features. I hope to find some time to migrate the site to the new Launch Library API hosted by my friends from thespacedevs.com.
Thank you for continued support, Marcin Jasiukowicz
PS1: If you want to talk more about the project or just talk about in spaceflight in general, please consider joining my Discord server: rocket.watch/discord
PS2: here are some resources about the project: https://stardust-bexus.net/ http://simle.pl/en/projects/stardust http://rexusbexus.net/bexus/
https://github.com/simle-stardust/Stardust/releases/tag/1.0.0 https://github.com/simle-stardust/PCB/releases/tag/1.0.0
https://ttnmapper.org/track/?experiment=Simle_Stardust&startdate=2020-07-20
I’m also attaching a .kml file that you can view in Google Earth, and a Mission Technical Report with preliminary results of the mission sent to our mentors at ESA.