Three secondary school students with a passion for technology are travelling to Noordwijk on Thursday. Their team, team Glidr, will see if their satellite project has impressed the judges at the Space Expo in Noordwijk sufficiently to make them the winners after an intense but rewarding journey. They developed a can-sized satellite – CanSat- which beautifully performed the tasks they had instructed it to.
On 21 March the team, consisting of Pranav Murugesh, Nilai Saxena, and Joshua Jose Chethalan, managed to launch their satellite. It shot up 1 km into the air, after which it steered itself back to land only 8o metres away from one of the three programmed coordinates within a kilometer wide radius. Only ten of the forty national teams had been selected to pass this hurdle and go to the Noordwijk finals. In taking part, team Glidr became part of the wider science community. For instance, the rocket to send their satellite up had been provided by Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering, and funded by the ESA.
Parties involved
The project is part of a competition in which up to forty Dutch teams can take part. It is organised by the European Space Agency. The ESA, together with the Netherlands Space Office, fund the project. The actual organisation is done by the European Space Education Reource Office, ESERO for short. In The Netherlands they work through Science Museum NEMO in Amsterdam. All these institutions aim to promote an interest in science and technoloy in young people between the ages of 14 to 19.
So it is a challenging project, but the team did not have to go it alone. After their proposal had been approved, they received feedback on their choices, and two of their teachers at the International School Eindhoven, Ms and Mr Nitu, also stood by them with help and advice. In their proposal, they had to persuade the judges by choosing two missions for the CanSat. They were constricted by the limited size of the CanSat, which has the dimensions of, well, a can.
More detail
The can-sized satellite was built with a 3-D printer using ABS, a type of plastic with excellent resistance and strength qualities. In the inside, it contains a micro-computer to gather real-time data, a servo to navigate the movements and a parafoil for landing. The focus of this project is the landing itself and the gathering of data which steers it through changing conditions. The initial destination of the landing also must be reached with a deviation not more than 100 meters.
Pranav, Joshua and Nilai told EindhovenNews that this task happened to be more challenging than they first thought in terms of technical execution but also when it comes to working together in a team. Pranav took care of the engineering design, while Joshua and Nilai were programming the computer, and they had to constantly coordinate their efforts to make it work. The most challenging part for Nilai was to find the error, sometimes very small, in the code, which stopped the progress of the work. They used C++ language to program it. Pranav was the one who led and organised the group and discovered what it means to be the manager of a project.
Missions
Their primary mission was the brief to all forty teams: the satellite must succeed in transmitting data when it is up in the air. Their secondary was self-devised: the programming to ensure that the satellite lands as close as possible to predetermined coordinates. The competition, therefore, has an interesting uniformity and diversity combined. And that’s not all. They also had to provide all the documentation, in a series of deadlines, ensure publicity through various media, and use the story of their journey to spread their enthusiasm to science and technology.
Group projects also come with inbuilt challenges. School, with a full timetable and homework is part of every secondary student’s life. But teamwork makes this more demanding, as the team members all bring their own expertise to the project, but they all have to deliver in time for the next person to carry it along. The week before the March 21 moment of truth was nerve-racking, but the whole project is also enormous fun for people who love what they are doing and learn to depend on eachother.
What’s next?
So, on 17 April the ten national teams will present themselves in Noordwijk at the Space Expo, to hear if they can make it to the final stage. Together with the winners from other European countries’ national competitions, they might spend three days in June participating in a event called “space engineering for a day”. Next week, Eindhoven News will inform readers of the results. Whatever the result, the whole experience must be extremely rewarding for young people with a passion for science.
For Eindhoven News: Greta Timmers & Vanya Dobrikova. Interview conducted on 11 April
All illustrative material provided by Team Gllidr
