Portland State Aerospace Society
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| This article may not meet the notability guidelines for companies and organizations. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please expand or rewrite the article to establish its notability. The best way to address this concern is to reference published, third-party sources about the subject. If notability cannot be established, the article is more likely to be considered for redirection, merge or ultimately deletion, per Wikipedia:Guide to deletion. This article has been tagged since June 2008. |
The Portland State Aerospace Society (or PSAS), founded in 1998, is a student group at Portland State University building high powered rockets with the vision of putting nanosatellites into Earth orbit. Pursuing this vision has led to building advanced avionics, adaptable airframes, and high energy rocket engines. PSAS attempts to be open in its development, including posting CAD drawings and schematics, and maintaining its GPL and MIT-licensed software in git and Subversion.
[edit] Rocket generations
[edit] LV0
The first airframe, LV0 was a proof of concept for some of the radio systems, including real-time broadcast video. LV0 was launched in June of 1998.
[edit] LV1
The second airframe, LV1 was flown to 3.6 km (12,000 feet) in April of 1999. It added an emergency uplink system, an Inertial Measurement Unit, and more advanced telemetry.
LV1b was an extension of the LV1 rocket to add a GPS module, an improved flight computer, and improved IMU. It was flown to 13.53 km (11,600 feet) in October of 2000.
[edit] LV2
The third airframe, LV2 was first flown as an airframe only (with commercial flight computer) in September of 2002. It reached apogee at around 18,000 feet and a maximum velocity of 900 miles per hour, over Mach 1.
LV2.1 was the second flight of LV2 in August 2005, with the complete avionics system. The modular aluminum airframe measured 11 feet tall, 5.25 inches wide, and weighed 115 pounds. The avionics system included a 133 MHz Pentium flight computer running Linux, using 802.11 telemetry broadcast via custom-made cylindrical patch antennas, a GPS module, IMU module, temperature sensor, altimeter, and recovery node. The various nodes ran on PIC microcontrollers and were connected via a CAN bus. The motor was an ammonium perchlorate and aluminum mixture, and the rocket reached a maximum altitude over 18,000 feet AGL. Rocket telemetry was successful, but the nosecone appeared to not release at apogee when the recovery charges were fired. The result was a descent in "lawn dart" mode, where no parachutes open and the rocket lands nearly straight into the ground.
[edit] LV2c
The fourth airframe and replacement avionics are currently being designed. The airframe will retain the modular design, moving to 5.5 inch diameter tubing (a more standard size). The next avionics system plans to use a PowerPC flight computer and ARM microcontroller nodes connected via USB.
[edit] Other projects
Other areas of research include design and testing of an oxygen/paraffin hybrid rocket engine, development of real-time control algorithms for in-flight steering (a requirement for orbital spaceflight), CAN bus debugging hardware ("CANtelope"), enhancing the Linux USB driver, and development of open source GPS firmware.
