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Held this year in Texas, the competition has nothing to do with satellites, but it does involve rockets, payload deployment, telemetry and, this year, autogyros.
In a nut shell, CanSat 2019 required students to construct a two-part payload that was launched to an altitude of between 670 and 725m – each university’s project was launched separately.
The CanSat had to deploy near peak altitude – “orientation of deployment is not controlled and is most definitely violent,” warned the organisers – and then unfurl a parachute to control descent rate to a target of 20m/s.
At and altitude of 450m, the CanSat has to eject its science payload, which had to be in the form of an auto-gyro with a descent rate between 10 and 15m/s.
The flying payload then had to transmit telemetry from sensors for altitude (using air pressure), external temperature, battery voltage and GPS position, as well as pitch, roll and blade spin rate from the autogyro.
On landing, all telemetry transmission had to stop, to be replaced by an audio beacon for location purposes.
The first five teams were:
- 1st Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
- 2nd Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University, Turkey
- 3rd AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
- 4th National Technical University of Athens, Greece
- 5th Cankaya University, Turkey
And after Arizona State University in 6th place, Turkey yet again featured as İstanbul Gedik University was 7th.
There were two British teams: the University of Manchester (10th) and the University of Southampton (pictured) in 19th (full results here).
Around 100 teams entered this year’s competition. These were ranked through preliminary design reviews, and the 40 highest ranked were selected for the launch weekend.
“Team Soton were ranked seventh overall entering the Texas event with only two British teams qualifying,” according to Southampton University. “However they slipped to a final placing of 19th after losing communication to the payload prior to take off which may have been related to software issues or damage to the power systems.”
What ever the ranking, it looks looks all the teams had a lot of fun.
“Although similar competitions exist for other fields of engineering – robots, radio-control airplanes, racing cars – most space-related competitions are paper design competitions,” said the Society. “While these are worthwhile, they do not give students the satisfaction of being involved with the end-to-end life cycle of a complex engineering project, from conceptual design, through integration and test, actual operation of the system and concluding with a post-mission summary and debrief.”
Photo: University of Southampton 2019 CasSat team in Texas.
