And we’re back! Following a weekend catching up on work and exploring the Ardennes – La Roche-en-Ardenne in the sun on Saturday and Grottes De Hotton and Liège on a slightly damp and foggy Sunday, we return to thermal testing of Pathfinder. You may remember, over the weekend we left the payload powered off and …
This morning, George made his return to the airwaves. He joined Claire Cavanagh and our own Professor Lucy Berthoud on BBC Radio Bristol to discuss the exciting talk happening at the University of Bristol tonight. Col. Anne McClain is a University of Bristol alumni and NASA Astronaut who has spent over 203 days in space, …
Read more “George’s Radio Return & NASA Astronaut Talk at Bristol”
Good morning from the thermal testing team of PROVE Pathfinder from ESA’s CubeSat Support Facility in Belgium! On Tuesday (11th April) we arrived on site ready to get our payload out of the oven and start our campaign. Following a safety briefing, we got into clean room attire in a process we’re becoming very familiar …
Read more “Environmental Testing Campaign: Thermal Days 1 and 2”
Following on from the vibration testing of the last week, the vibrations team has been swapped for the thermal team. The last thing that the vibration team did before leaving was to put PROVE Pathfinder into an oven for a bakeout – taken to a low vacuum and held at a steady temperature for a …
Say hello to the PROVE Pathfinder Team! We are a team of dedicated University of Bristol undergraduates, postgraduates and staff across multiple schools and faculties. Whilst a lot of our members study aerospace degrees, we also have members from electronics engineering, physics and earth sciences! We would like to thank Nick Yue for taking this …
Our Visual Camera (the Basler ace acA5472-5GC) interfaces to our desgined-in-house PCB (more detail to follow in a later post) and to our payload computer (the BeagleBone Black Enhanced Industrial). It takes power via a Harwin Gecko connector from the PCB, and the data interface is Gigabit Ethernet on the payload computer. Out of the …
After many months of work, we are pleased to announce that PROVE Pathfinder has finished assembly of its Engineering Model. Following a full software test – where everything we expected to pass did – we completed a test imaging pass on the physics building from the window of our lab – a little hard to …
Our first update on technical things. This time from the structures team looking at the process of drilling sensitive optical components – at PROVE Pathfinder, that means lenses! Both our thermal infrared (TIR) and our optical (VIS) camera lenses are Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) and are not designed to be used in a vacuum …