| FIRST MISSION A SUCCESS !!
| The first flight of the CAPNSPACE program was a success!!
Mission #CNS-001 was launched from the Edgerton City Park in Edgerton, KS on 21-August-2004 at 09:51.
The chase crew followed the CAPSTAR-1 package to about 4 miles east of Harrisonville, Missouri. Touchdown was at 12:35. The package was found by a local resident, Tim Soulis, and recovered it to his place of business.
The chase team caught up with the package at 1500 on 21-Aug-2004.
Payload
APRS on 144.340mhz
SSTV on 147.585mhz
Digital Camera
Recovery Systems
ELT Practice Beacon at 121.775mhz
2meter Voice Beacon on 146.585mhz
posted 08-30-2004 | 09:52:53 | article number: 4
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| MISSION IMAGES
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posted 08-29-2004 | 20:58:45 | article number: 3
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| FLIGHT PLOT
| Because the GPS malfunctioned at 28,000ft the track is derived from using BALLOON TRACK with weather data from TOPEKA weather staion. Based on those, the estimated burst altitude was 107,000 ft.
posted 08-29-2004 | 20:37:57 | article number: 2
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| Mission Narrative
| The launch team arrived at the city park in Edgerton, KS at 0700.
The HABITAT-Skylab group didn't make it for about another 20 minutes. We'd started setting up North of the entrance on the soccer field and HABITAT set-up to the South.
While the weather was clear, the park was in a low lying area and densly fogged in, forcing us to delay actual launch by an hour.
[Note: Later on we would find out that we hadn't spent enough time beforehand coordinating frequencies with the HABITAT team]
Filling the balloon took place with almost no trouble. There was nearly no wind, at first, but started picking up a little at about 09:30.
Turning on the power and powering up the systems in CAPSTAR-1 began after the balloon had been filled. We were attempting to launch at the same time as the HABITAT group and both they and the CAPNSPACE group (us), had some problems getting the avionics going. We we're especially concerned that the GPS didn't seem to want to get an initial lock. The GPS finally initialized and we were ready to go! (We didn't know it but the SSTV transceiver had gotten set to the testing frequency)
The balloon handlers worked to coordinate the launch and the countdown was made over the radio and both groups launched at 09:51.
Now the launch crew began packing the launch equipment and helium tanks. The launch team then changed roles and became the chase team.
The chase team took a little time but in about 10 minutes we were receiving tracking data from the onboard APRS.
After about 15 minutes, the timer for the ELT practice beacon turned the ELT on (121.775mhz). It wasn't supposed to power the ELT up for an hour. As it turned out though, that was good because at about 28,000 ft, the GPS stopped working. One miniute it was giving accurate data and the next it was reporting that it was in Lee's Summit. As we were pretty sure that the balloon couldn't achive warp speed, we started tracking CAPSTAR-1 with the ELT.
We could receive APRS data from the HABITAT balloon so we started following it, rationalizing that both packages would be going roughly the same direction and speed.
As it turns out, CNS-001 was ascending a little faster than HABITAT and HABITAT caught a 70mph wind.
We tried to keep up while remaining within the speed limit. The projections we ran with BALTRACK that morning showed the approximate landing site to be just East of Harrisonville which proved to be accurate compared to the track we were plotting.
We had an additional tracker in the field, Col William Winkert. He was tracking the ELT from Peculiar Missouri, and met us in Harrisonville.
posted 08-29-2004 | 19:35:28 | article number: 1
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