CanSat Competition and BalloonSat trip

We are delighted to share an update on this year’s CanSat Competition and BalloonSat trip. 

CanSat 

This year’s regional round of the CanSat competition was held on Tuesday, 29 March, at Midland Rocketry Club. Many thanks to Dr Chris Harrison for driving team Nebula in the school minibus, leaving at 5:30am to make it in time! The team’s secondary mission was an autonomous controlled landing parafoil system for deploying a small payload to a specified location. The team worked hard on repairs to their CanSat in the morning while it looked like fog would cancel the launch. At the last minute, the fog lifted and they had a successful launch with data collected from the onboard sensors. Unfortunately, however, the team was not selected to participate in this year’s final. There were an unprecedented number of teams in this year’s competition, with over 50 teams vying for one of ten places in the final. The judges remarked that the standard this year is higher than ever and wanted to pass on how impressed they were, especially given the extreme challenges that schools, teachers and students have faced over the past couple of years.

BalloonSat 

This year’s BalloonSat Fifth Form team was made up of Kai, Leo, Michael, Paul, Aarush and Saadhyan. The team built an experiment to look at cosmic radiation in the stratosphere and then travelled to Brussels to launch their experiment balloon at the Asgard XI campaign. The SPS team did a fantastic presentation of their work at the conference and were rewarded with the recovery of their experimental data with the balloon. Initial analysis of the data clearly showed the Regener-Pfotzer (RP) maximum (the altitude at which cosmic radiation intensity is the greatest). They will now produce a scientific poster for publication by the Planetarium.