What are aerospace probes? • Project • Details

Our aerospace probes are balloons filled with helium, carrying astrobiological experiments to the stratosphere, which is crucial so we can have a better understanding about how organisms can survive in space.

Although they are part of a greater scientific experiment, the probes themselves are also fascinating from the point of view of embedded systems development. Our probes are equiped with microcontrolers, radios, sensors and cameras; every mission we aim to improve our systems so we can make the next mission even more efficient.

And, to sustain all our experiments and systems, we build reliable and reusable structures, that let us go to space multiple times.

After Garatéa-1, our primary goal was to increase the quality of our Space Probes. The Embedded System Architecture was based on an Atmega. In software, we decide to pure C without the use of the Arduino functions, but we also permit the use of C++ during development. We also use Arduino Watchdog Timer.

In our previous Space Probe, the sensors reads were not constant, because we didn't have solar panels. Now that we do, energy-saving was no longer an issue for us. So, we were able to make many reads. That was also our first try to use GitHub for code versioning.

The structure was made with Kapton, Aeronautic Depron, 3D printing and Glass Fiber.

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