SpaceFish breaking news.

We have kept this site without update for a long time… this is not so good, because now we have to summarize all the news in a single post .

First of all, we want to announce that our project has been delayed. We are doing well in our schedule, but unfortunately many extra tests have to be done to perform a perfect flight in Kiruna and resolving all kind of safety issues, as well the SpaceFish ship has been redesigned too.

The new SpaceFish model

The new SpaceFish is larger and can achieve more stability at high velocities, we are not going to use any kind of motor in Kiruna, it will be a pure glider version without air in-takes.

Now we have to build new molds, we selected one company from Poland. Kamil is ready in Warsaw to supervise this job.

Kamil supervising some aircraft molds during his studentship this summer.

We presented this issues to the experts board at the end of July at DLR, they were very comprehensive and let us the opportunity of keep working with the next RexusBexus experiment in 2010, under the condition of keep the good job under a strict (and now realistic) schedule.

Now focusing inside the SpaceFish project, the first flying autopilot candidate did his first test-field outside the laboratory successfully! We tested it on board of a “little” minesweeper. This ship is part of a Fernando’s project and David and Héctor wanted to help him taking all kind of telemetry with the autopilot. We applied all the ideas that we presented to the experts the last July and we got an amazing results, with stable measures (less than 1º without any kind of filter! we are really waiting to see what will do our Kalman filter!), a noiseless radio-link, a really cool software in the ground station (we will do a specific new for this chapter), a mechanical robust design and also a good behavior with different temperatures.

Héctor and David with the telemetry system

Here there is a video of the “minesweeper” maneuvers.

The next step is taking the autopilot to a real glider and start to take inputs and outputs to do models and other control stuff in the next days.