How We Plan to Accomplish This Amazing Feat – Part 1
T-Plus 6 Months
Since May 2006, we have focused on hardware design and the design of the experiments. We formed a student design team to do much of the design and construction work. We found a number of sensor options that were appropriate for our task. We began the design work on a Mudd-designed data acquisition system to meet educational objectives. We found an off-the-shelf board (the RDAS flight computer) that was used as a data acquisition system for the pre-pilot version of the course.
The RDAS flight computer has a maximum sample rate of 200 SPS, a 10-bit A-to-D resolution, and just over 300 kB of storage. It has an axial accelerometer, and an altitude pressure sensor. It was additionally configured with a 900 MHz telemetry system. The RDAS allows a total of six analog inputs beyond the accelerometer and altimeter.
Student teams worked on data acquisition and telemetry systems; these are described in detail in Avionics Design.
