By Tadhg Peavoy and Paul Duffy
Team Telescobe, a group of engineering students from the Dublin Institute of Technology, have become the first ever Irish team to be selected to fly an experiment on a sounding rocket as part of the European Space Agency's REXUS competition.
Team Telescobe were selected to fly after presenting their proposal at the European Space Agency's ESTEC centre in Noordwjik, The Netherlands, in December 2009.
The team consists of five postgraduate engineering students: Mark Wylie, Paul Duffy, Dinesh Vather, Stephen Curran and Jack Keegan. A selection of undergraduate engineering students from DIT are also participating in the experiment. The group itself is being advised by Dr Marek Rebow, Head of Engineering Research in DIT.
The team's launch and experiment is being funded by the European Space Agency and DIT, while Enterprise Ireland and Irish aerospace companies are contributing to the project in the form of both help and equipment.
The March 2011 launch will provide the students with a chance to send their experiment on a sub-orbital space flight.
The launched experiment will examine the feasibility of a prototype telescopic boom, which may be used for deployment of probes to perform scientific measurements.
Traditionally probes used on rockets for high altitude research are stored in a similar fashion to an umbrella within the rocket. When the target altitude is reached they deploy in the same way you would open an umbrella.
This technique requires a relatively large amount of space within the rocket. Also, due to the forces involved, the probe length is limited, thus reducing the quantity and quality of measurements that may be performed.
The majority of rockets for high altitude research spin at quite a high rate (approx 4revs/sec) to stabilise their flight. Team Telescobe's probe deployment technique takes advantage of the centrifugal force generated by this rotation.
The design is stored in the rocket in a similar fashion to an internal television aerial in its closed position. When the target height is reached, a release mechanism is triggered allowing the probe to deploy telescopically due to the centrifugal force, i.e. in the same way you pull the television aerial to extend it.
This design reduces the space required, increasing the number of probes that may be used on any one rocket. The greater achievable deployment length allows for a larger array of measurements to be made.
REXUS is a Europe-wide student competition run by the European Space Agency (ESA) giving students the chance to fly an experiment on a sounding rocket from the Esrange Space Centre in Kiruna, Sweden. It has a partner program called BEXUS, which is a competition to launch an experiment on a high altitude balloon. The program is supported by DLR (Germany) and SNSB (Sweden).
Team Telescobe will travel to the Arctic Circle-based Esrange Space Centre at the start of next month for a training week and preliminary experiment design review.
Further training and review weeks are scheduled in both Sweden and Germany later in the year.
Team Telescobe will also be undertaking an outreach programme. Through this programme they will be discussing the project with second and third-level students through a series of lectures and seminars.
Information on the outreach programme, as well as the team’s progress, will be found in the coming weeks and months at the sites below:
Facebook – Rexus Dit
Wordpress.com – REXUS DIT
The DIT website
Please see the following link for a video of a REXUS launch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HNfPuAs1UM
