[X] My Assistant

[james_coxon]

Hey Everyone,
After the massive interest in the HAPS-1/2 balloon launches I thought you lot would be interested to know that we are planning to launch this Sunday (02/11/08) at approximately 11.00am GMT from Cambridge,UK. The payload is a little different to HAPS-1 as instead of the camera saving the pictures to its memory, the flight computer downloads them and then transmits them using the SSTV protocol so we should be able to receive images inflight (though pretty low quality compared to the normal pictures). This concept was meant to be tested on HAPS-1 but wasn't working on the day (like most of the flight computer!).

So the payload hardware consists of:

Gumstix Verdex + GPSstix (Ublox 4 GPS)
GM862 GSM module
Canon Powershot A60
Radiometrix NTX2 434.075MHz at 10mW

Pictures on Flickr
More info can be found on Pegasus HAB Project

Tracking will mainly be done by radio (RTTY at 300baud, ASCII-8, 200Hz shift) and also the radio will transmit the sstv images but as a back up the GSM module will send SMSs containing the gps coordinates on landing.

Online tracking (with pictures) will be at spacenear.us and there will be discussions concerning the flight etc on #highaltitude99 on freenode.