Portland State Aerospace Society

The Portland State Aerospace Society (or PSAS), founded in 1998, is a student group at Portland State University building high powered rockets with the vision of putting nanosatellites into Earth orbit. Pursuing this vision has led to building advanced avionics, adaptable airframes, and high energy rocket engines. PSAS attempts to be open in its development, including posting CAD drawings and schematics, and maintaining its GPL and MIT-licensed software in git and Subversion.__NOTOC__

Rocket generations

LV0

The first airframe, "LV0" was a proof of concept for some of the radio systems, including real-time broadcast video. LV0 was launched in June 1998.

LV1

The second airframe, "LV1" was flown to 3.6 km (12,000 feet) in April 1999. It added an emergency uplink system, an Inertial Measurement Unit, and more advanced telemetry.

"LV1b" was an extension of the LV1 rocket to add a GPS module, an improved flight computer, and improved IMU. It was flown to 13.53 km (11,600 feet) in October 2000.

LV2

The third airframe, "LV2" was first flown as an airframe only (with commercial flight computer) in September 2002. It reached apogee at around 18,000 feet and a maximum velocity of 900 miles per hour, over Mach 1.

"LV2.1" was the second flight of LV2 in August 2005, with the complete avionics system. The modular aluminum airframe measured 11 feet tall, 5.25 inches wide, and weighed 115 pounds. The avionics system included a 133 MHz Pentium flight computer running Linux, using 802.11 telemetry broadcast via custom-made cylindrical patch antennas, a GPS module, IMU module, temperature sensor, altimeter, and recovery node. The various nodes ran on PIC microcontrollers and were connected via a CAN bus. The motor was an ammonium perchlorate and aluminum mixture, and the rocket reached a maximum altitude over 18,000 feet AGL. Rocket telemetry was successful, but the nosecone appeared to not release at apogee when the recovery charges were fired. The result was a descent in "lawn dart" mode, where no parachutes open and the rocket lands nearly straight into the ground.

LV2c

The fourth airframe and replacement avionics are currently being designed. The airframe will retain the modular design, moving to 5.5 inch diameter tubing (a more standard size). The next avionics system plans to use a PowerPC flight computer and ARM microcontroller nodes connected via USB.

Other projects

Other areas of research include design and testing of an oxygen/paraffin hybrid rocket engine, development of real-time control algorithms for in-flight steering (a requirement for orbital spaceflight), CAN bus debugging hardware ("CANtelope"), enhancing the Linux USB driver, and development of open source GPS firmware.

External links

* [http://psas.pdx.edu/ Portland State Aerospace Society wiki]