Octa Aerospace

https://www.octaaerospace.com/spaceapps/

https://github.com/Octa-Aerospace

"Travel allows us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and be educated, to learn to respect foreign cultures, to establish friendships and, above all, to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world" Jules Verne.

From 1955 to the present has changed the human notion of space, with creations not only to solve space exploration, but to solve major pains such as life-saving firefighter implements with their suits, connectivity to the internet, the space world has undoubtedly given us great tools to prosper mankind, But everything wonderful has benign marks, like finding some places with almost no access to technology or space education as the Latin American case and in others where they are already thinking of building houses on Mars, that is why it is necessary to enhance skills of those who are the future and present of humanity "The youth", it is under that pain that Octa-Sat is born.

Our project consists of an educational tool for STEM education, aimed at students from high school to university. The latter (students) are trained to develop programming skills in Python, learn about electronics and telecommunications using our hardware in a mission that culminates with the launch of a stratospheric balloon.

In particular we have designed a device categorized as CanSat, which is able to obtain data such as: Altitude, Location, Barometric Pressure, Temperature, Humidity, Inclination and Acceleration, and last but not least an optical sensor to capture photographs. All the information is reported in real time, via a LoRa transmitter, allowing students to receive telemetry from the ground station (on their devices), which in turn allows them to visualize and analyze the data with NASA's Open MCT mission control tool.

A relatively inexpensive way to teach about nanosatellites and stratospheric balloons, without having to develop a satellite costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, it allows for teamwork and STEM skills acquisition.

We hope to take this prototype to become a product that can reach the youth of Latin America as a tool to democratize knowledge, along with supporting the educational curricula of governments. In the specific case of Chile we are working hard in Octa Aerospace for the implementation of that technology as part of the educational program of the new national satellite system of Chile.

In relation to the code, Python 3 has been used in the CanSat and Ground Station. Additionally, JavaScript was used in the NASA Open MCT tool. For the development of PCB boards we used KiCAD. For the design of the encapsulation (CanSat) 3D, we used Autodesk fusion 360.

For the balloon trajectory simulations we used the CUSF (Cambridge University Spaceflight) landing predictor which in turn uses meteorological data from the United States Geological Service.

Octa Aerospace has been using NASA Open MCT as a mission control dashboard for this project. It provides us a useful set of plugins to display and filter our CanSat telemetry data on Linux and other Operative Systems, and it is open-source as almost every other tool used in our project.

Along with Open-MCT, Octa has been implementing the NASA Technology Readiness Level system to organize the development process (not only in this competition).

Being in Nasa Space Apps has given us many tools, both technical and social, because in the team moments we never lacked laughter, ideas, because we know from the deepest that the most powerful tool that can be delivered in a team is to feel comfortable and happy. We have managed to build and strengthen our passion for the aerospace area, with our project we managed to connect with a social pain, which has not allowed our countries to progress in the technological field, which is not having enough knowledge and investment in science, and as a solution to our main passion we found Octa-Sat, which undoubtedly will make the lives of many young people in Latin America to reconnect with their natural tribe. Finally we would like to emphasize that the most important thing in our team is the interdisciplinary potential.

Octa Aerospace

Open MCT

Mission Design and Analysis of USM High-Altitude Balloon

Scientific Balloons | NASA

Students send Balloons to the Stratosphere

#hardware #software #octa #cansat #chile

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.