While SpaceX’s Starman gets to drive through space in a luxurious Tesla Roadster, Flying Squirrels have to fly in Styrofoam class. The 1” thick Styrofoam enclosure will keep the flight electronics and battery warm in sub zero temperatures that are found at high altitudes. Our intrepid squirrel will also be wearing a stylish pink fiberglass […]
[This schedule is out of date. The new schedule is located at : ] This is the final FS2 Telemetry schedule. The columns labeled “Min” is the minutes into the hour (i.e. 0 = top of the hour) that the scheduled event should happen. The schedule repeats after 30 minutes. Launch is tentatively targeted for […]
High altitude balloons are expected to drift, in the atmosphere. But Flying Squirrel #2 (FS2) has had some drifting problems of another kind. During construction as the FS2 flight electronics went from a breadboard prototype to final construction, a problem emerged. FS2 was not WSPRing clearly. In fact, it seemed to be more of a […]
Introducing our next intrepid sky traveler. The burning question of the Flying Squirrel #1 mission is “Where did it go?” and ultimately, “Where/when did it land?” So far the final resting place of FS1 has not been reported by anyone on the ground. It could be lost in the mountains and deserts of South […]
One of the goals of the Flying Squirrel mission was to keep the project “affordable” so that a STEM education program or individual can afford to conduct similar missions. The arbitrary chosen goal was to keep the cost per flight under $50.00 USD. The spreadsheet below shows what the FS#1 flight costs were. Spoiler alert, […]
The Flight of a Brave Squirrel I spent time cleaning up the FS1 Telemetry data and turned it into and Excel spreadsheet and the following graphs. The FSQCal program we used to decode the FS1 telemetry will record all the perfect message packets into the file fs1.txt as part of the protocol, […]
A quick Synopsis More details will follow after I can clean up the data, but here are the flight statistics collected from the balloon telemetry. The flight was a lot of fun and a success! Flight Quick Stats Launch Date 201-1-16 Time of lift-off: 19:24 UTC 11:24 AM PST Launch Location: Anderson Dry […]
The FS#1 flight controller is designed to measure basic weather information (Barometric Altitude, Air Pressure and Temperature) and relay that information periodically to the ground via radio telemetry using the FSQ protocol. Additionally, the flight controller conserves battery power by turning off the radio and weather sensor between transmissions. In a nutshell the […]
Jan 16th 2018 Launch day Weather looking very good for FS1 launch this morning. Predictions show a flight path in a South Easterly direction towards Joshua Tree from our planned Johnson Valley, CA launch point. Expecting launch around 1800 UTC. Tune 28.140mhz usb for FSQ telemetry. #HAB #HamRadio Jan 13th 2018 – Update Winds and […]
Meet our intrepid explorer Flying Squirrel One. This very brave explorer will be the first Squirrel Engineering project to be launched in to the upper atmosphere lofted by nothing more than a 36 inch Helium filled party balloon. During the flight, our explorer will dutifully report temperature, air pressure and altitude back to mission control […]
