A new chapter: ARCADE-R2

The submission of the last ARCADE Student Experiment Documentation, at the beginning of this year, officially closed the first chapter of the ARCADE story, which proved to be an unforgettable experience.

Now, after a very important year for all the team members – some graduated, some had important experiences abroad, some enrolled in a PhD course – our mission is to refurbish ARCADE, improve it and make it fly again aboard a BEXUS balloon, in order to further exploit its potentialities and to fully achieve its goals as a technology demonstrator.

First milestone in sight: the REXUS/BEXUS Selection Workshop 2012, where we will present our proposal.

This is the dawn of the ARCADE-R2 project.

Past, present and future

It is already more than one month that the exciting BEXUS 12/13 launch campaign ended. After a period signed by a mix of relax, study and some additional work as well, it is finally time to tell, in brief, the story of the mission and what happened next.

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The BEXUS 13 balloon, hosting ARCADE, was launched on Sept 28th and it lifted smoothly towards the sky over ESRANGE. It was really a great emotion, after a year of hard work, to see ARCADE fly and disappear into the blue.

VIDEO: BEXUS 13 lift-off

Unfortunaltely, at T+15 minutes and after some successful manual commands, ARCADE experienced a connection dropout that prevented any further communication with the ground station. The few operations were all filmed by the onboard high definition camera, that operated properly for the whole flight.

VIDEO: ARCADE Flight Operations

Luckily, the experiment was retrieved in a very good shape from the mechanical and electrical point of view. In particular, the post-flight analysis revealed that the experiment was perfectly working again right after its power-on. During the little available time at ESRANGE it was not possible to recreate the same exact loss of connection occurred during the mission, however it was proved that certain command sequences could severely compromise the stability of the flight computer, making the experiment virtually uncontrollable. Other random software failures were also observed, making it the main suspect for the failure.

At the moment the experiment is on its way back to Italy, where deeper investigation will be made. In any case, it was agreed to proceed with a complete rewrite of the control software, so that ARCADE potentiality could be further exploited by presenting it in Control classes at University of Padova. The first meetings have already taken place and a new preliminary software structure was prepared.

In addition, since ARCADE survived the whole flight and demonstrated to be BEXUS-compliant, it was  recently proposed to ESA as backup experiment for the upcoming flight campaign.
The proposal was ACCEPTED. This means that there is a small chance for a secont flight, which could turn into a certainty if some room becomes available onboard one of the two gondolas throughout the year: yet another another good reason to refurbish and improve the experiment as soon as possible!

For all these reasons… continue to stay tuned, because ARCADE story is not over yet!

Alessandro

TONS of new pictures!

FINALLY!

After the pre-campaign version of the Student Experiment Document (SED v. 4.0) was finalized and sent, there was eventually the time to update the “Photos” section of the website, that was left behind for quite a long time.

So take a minute and have a look to what the ARCADE Team has been doing during the last months: http://www.experimentarcade.org/wordpress/?page_id=83

You will see how the experiment has been growing day after day, all the tests we have done, the events we have participated to and much much more… The best way to warm up the engines for the Launch Campaign coming up next week!

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Alessandro

En route to ESRANGE

After a last, intense week of work – almost around the clock! – and the Experiment Acceptance Review, ARCADE was finally shipped and it started its long journey to ESRANGE.

The cowntdown to the exciting Launch Campaign has begun!

Alessandro

Mid-August Update

Hello, ARCADE fans!

The IPR was finally held on July 28th-29th and it was a great success! In particular, the level of integration allowed the experts to give us many useful suggestions to improve the reliability of the experiment. Next milestone is the Experiment Acceptance Review (EAR), planned for September 7th just prior to the shipment to ESRANGE.

Since then, many further steps and important enhancements have been done in all the different areas of the project: Mechanics, Electronics, Motion Control, Software, Environmental Sensors and, particularly, Thermal and Vacuum Testing. There may be a very special description of them coming soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, enjoy this refreshing picture taken by the flight IP-Cam inside our thermal chamber, after four hours of continuous operation in a -30°C to -50°C environment.

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All the best,
Ale

23/06/11: ARCADE enters MAIT phase

After a month of work following the CDR, Thursday afternoon a cornerstone of the ARCADE project was eventually put in place:  all the 2D mechanical drawings were sent to the manufacturing companies for machining. The electronic and power system layout and PCBs schematics were also completed and they will just need some fine tuning following simulations and tests.

In conclusion, we are proud to announce the official beginning of the C/D Phase (Manufacturing, Assembly, Integration and Test) of the ARCADE Project!

And… stay tuned for updates!

Alessandro

ARCADE Logo ver.1.1

Our logo was updated to version 1.1, in order to truly represent a Tetris screenshot and… well, to make Koen happy.

The following figure better shows how it changed.

The “Lil Bro” of the ARCADE experiment

After a couple of week of intense contacts, we proudly announce the participation of the ARCADE Team to the 10th edition of “Sperimentando”, a University of Padova scientific exhibition that counted more than 12000 visitors last year!

The exhibition will be held from April 11th to May 15th at the “Ex macello”, located in Cornaro Street 1, Padova, Italy. There we will have a stand with promotional material and a mystery “Lil Bro” version of the ARCADE experiment, to interact with the visitors and to make them… PLAY!

Here we unveil for the very first time how its structure will look like:

If you are in the nearby… you can’t really miss it!

ARCADE Photos!

Finally, the long-awaited ARCADE pictures upload has begun!
By now there are four great galleries covering the Selection Workshop held last December at ESTEC in Noordwijk, but many more are coming soon!

So… STAY TUNED!

Alessandro

Welcome

Welcome to the official website of the ARCADE Experiment!