GENERAL INFORMATION

Launch site:	Esrange Space Center
Campaign period:	October 3 to October 11, 2008
Launch date:	8 October 2008

EXPERIMENT DESCRIPTION

ICARUS:
A combined Romanian-Polish research team studies the feasibility of using a lifting body vehicle to recover small to medium experimental payloads from high altitude balloons. A lifting body is an “aerodynamic configuration” where the body itself produces lift. The drag and structure of the wing is minimized for high speed flight (e.g.: re-entry). However a lifting body structure can also be used for recovery of high altitude payloads in low speed flight regime given some changes in the aerodynamics of the entire vehicle. Given the initial high altitude and the low loading of the lifting body, the vehicle can glide for considerable distances bringing the experiments to the ground in a controlled manner and in a controlled area. At the same time the internal volume of a lifting body can be used for several experiments mounted on standard mounts and using standard mechanical/electrical interfaces.
The ICARUAS team believes that this type of vehicle/recovery capability would be of great help to the high altitude scientific community since today the recovery is done by conventional parachutes and the distance between take-off point and recovery point can become quite significant. The flight test will test an experimental lifting body vehicle by radio guiding it back to a pre-determined landing area.

Team:
Florin Mingireanu (Universitatea Politehnica Bucuresti, Romania)
Kamil Glebowicz (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
Grzegorz Misiolek (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
Grzegorz Wozniak


LowCOINS Low Cost Inertial Navigation System:
The peculiarity of an Inertial Navigation System (INS) is that does not require any external reference in order to determine position, orientation, or velocity. INS is the only self-contained navigation system, therefore it is specially suitable for applications on rockets or balloons. Low.Co.I.N.S is a low cost inertial navigation system based on a strapdown design that foresees the use of accelerometers and gyros rigidly connected to the vehicle. Inertial measurements are obtained by MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems )-based motion sensing devices. MEMS technology is improving day over day, and it will probably reach a sufficient level of accuracy in the near future to provide an effective low cost alternative in the production of inertial navigators where extremely high accuracy is not required. The limits of actual MEMS sensors are known and our experiment wants to test those limits trying to find out the maximum performances derivable from using them in extreme environment.

Team:
Paolo Montefusco (Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy)
Emanuele Medaglia (Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy)
Maria Cristina Oliva (Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy)


TURAWIND Turbulence in the stratopspheric wind field:
Gravity waves and turbulence in the atmosphere play a crucial role in understanding the energy and momentum transfer as well as the trace gas distribution. Breaking gravity waves produce structures in the temperature and wind fields down to the size of turbulence cells. Stratospheric turbulence is therefore very important to comprehend the propagation of gravity waves into the mesosphere and to understand fundamental stratospheric processes.
Within the project TURAWIND we will measure turbulent structures in the horizontal wind field from the ground up to the stratosphere. The measurement principle is based on the air-flow induced cooling of a wire, which is connected to a Wheatstone bridge. Change of the flow velocity will cause voltage variations, which provide information about turbulence.

Team:
Anne Theuerkauf (Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics IAP, Kühlungsborn, Germany)
Olga Suminska (University of Rostock, Germany)
Dörte Petzsch (University of Rostock, Germany)


TURATEMP Turbulence in the Stratospheric Temperature Field:
Gravity waves and turbulence in the atmosphere play a crucial role in understanding the energy and momentum transfer as well as the trace gas distribution. Breaking gravity waves produce structures in the temperature and wind fields down to the size of turbulence cells. Stratospheric turbulence is therefore very important to comprehend the propagation of gravity waves into the mesosphere and to understand fundamental stratospheric processes.
Within the project TURATEMP we will study the stratospheric turbulence by measuring the temperature fluctuations. The measurement principle is based on the proportionality between the speed of sound and the square root of the temperature.
To receive the speed of sound or rather the temperature fluctuations we will emit an acoustic signal (e.g. a continuous tone of 3000 Hz) by a signal transducer and receive this signal by a microphone. The emitted signal will undergo a phase delay, which is induced by atmospheric temperature changes. By detecting this phase shift we can determine the fast temperature fluctuations and thus the small scale turbulence.

Team:
Olga Suminska (University of Rostock, Germany)
Anne Theuerkauf (Leibniz Institute of Atmosheric Physics IAP, Kühlungsborn, Germany) 

Contact persons:
Olle Persson, SSC Esrange, olle.persson@ssc.se
Andreas Stamminger, DLR, andreas.stamminger@dlr.de
Harald Hellman, DLR, harald.hellman@dlr.de

Read more about BEXUS 6 at the REXUS/BEXUS website: www.rexusbexus.net
ESAs website for REXUS and BEXUS: http://www.esa.int/esaED/SEMVN973R8F_index_0.html
More information from ESAs website: http://www.esa.int/esaED/SEMPWY4N0MF_index_0.html
Pictures from the campaign at SNSBs website: http://www.rymdstyrelsen.se/bexus_2008.shtml