Project
This year’s Asgard edition (2023), Asgard-XII, we are specializing in measuring air pollution, VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds), temperature and the atmospheric pressure so we can calculate the altitude of the balloon.
Radio communication
We want to transmit our data to the ground receivers by making use of APRS. We have successfully completed the radio tests. These tests showed us that we can reliably receive GPS coordinates and data of the project.
Launch
On March 22, the day before the launch we presented our project to the other schools in the planetarium in Brussels. During these presentations, we got to know the projects of the other schools and listened to a lecture by Michaela Brchnelova about physical engineering. After the presentation of the projects by the various groups, which also included Portugese and British students.
Launch Day
On Thursday March 23, we were one of the schools who were allowed to take part in the recovery of the gondola. We left around 8:30 from Meininger Hotel to the Royal Meteorological Institute located in Uccle. There, we would pick up the GPS signals that our APRS system would transmit in order to determine the location of the balloon in flight. At 12:30 balloon-B (which contained our experiment) was launched. Balloon-A followed shortly after that at 12:42. After launching balloon-B, we picked up an APRS-signal. Strong westerly winds caused the balloon to be blown towards Germany at high speed. So of course we drove the same way. We received almost the whole ride APRS-signals with GPS-coördinates and our data. After about two hours the balloon stopped moving, meaning that it landed. There was only one problem: the APRS-signal came from the water at a harbour in Neuss. After asking a worker for help we began searching for the balloon. It didn’t take long before we found the balloon on the side of the canal. After only a bit of struggle we fished the gondola out of the water and had retrieved our projects successfully. In the evening around 20:00 we began to unbox the gondolas at the Meininger Hotel and all the different teams began the analysis of their data.