Flight Reflection

This years balloon launch was textbook perfect. The launch conditions were such that we could hold the last component in the train and simply release it upon countdown. The flight followed prediction extremely well. Landing occurred only a few miles from the predicted landing spot. The 3 primary experiment were successful as well. The first experiment was to determine if a passive directional control of the experimental module was possible. The flight video demonstrated that both the rotational speed and the angle of rotation was smaller than previous flights. This is encouraging and we have plans to add an active control for the next flight. The second experiment concerned sound at altitude and the student presented his results at the UI engineering expo. Lastly, the PongSat were a hit with the elementary students and they learned a lot about the scientific method.