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Welcome, everybody. Imagine you're a student and you've spent the better part of the last two semesters building your aerospace project. Now you're quite fed up with it and you need a way to get it away from you as quick as possible as far as possible. What better than using a balloon or even a rocket? Exactly. For this, there is rexes in Texas. And if you're wondering who is crazy enough to travel to the high north, freezing their fingers off, setting it all up, well, just talk to Pentagon Sayf. And give them a warm round of applause. So welcome to our talk on the Texas and Texas Project, which is one way to get your student experiments into space, or if you're a teacher, you can propose a topic for your students to do so. We both are simple students from Yena and Munich, and we are not talking in the name of the Texas program or the organizers. We just share our insights as participants in the program. So basically, Texas and Texas is your flight ticket into space for an experiment that you designed the program. Texas and Texas has realized under a bilateral agency agreement between the German Aerospace Center DLR and the Swedish National Spaceport SNB, which is some of the counterpart, the Swedish of the German dialog. Furthermore, the Swedish share of the payload has been made accessible to teams from ESA. And also there are a lot of organizations involved in this project that support the teams and the design and development of their experiments. So first for the Texas Rexall stands for rocket experiments for university students, and it's basically a cheap launch system with two launches per year. These are formally of these rocket motors are formerly military rockets, surface to air rockets that are repurposed to lift the scientific payload instead of warheads. Basically, we can use these rockets, can carry up to five experiments and they are unguided rockets. So there's no active vector control, for example, and they are simply spin stabilized. And the scienti
fic payload is about 30 kilograms, so as you can see, there are several modules there and basically normally there are four modules as these as these ring modules and there may be one behind or below the nosecone. Then there are Texas, Texas experiments are simply balloon experiments. Atmospheric research balloons, you have a gondola where you can put your experiments inside. These are up to six experiments per balloon and the. Plastic balloon is just filled with helium and then goes up to about 35 kilometers and eight. And you have still communication during the flight with your experiments. So all these launches take place from Kiruna Space Center in northern Sweden, near a town called Kiruna, just then you have a rough estimate. Well, it is. So if you go there in summer, it looks like this. Basically, that's also one of the reasons to have the space center there, there's a lot of nothing. So if the payload and the mortars fall back to ground, no one is hurt. And so it is a safe place to be. You also see in the foreground this big pad, the balloon pad, that's where the balloons are launched. And in the background where you have you are basically in the center of the image of the rocket launch pad. And there are multiple launches there for different rocket types. Because they are of course, they are not only this rocket launch launch there, but also other technology experiments. So how about all the organizations involved? So this table shows somehow a rough estimate of how these organizations work together. They make bridge the borders to other services. So basically from from the beginning on this, the deal our space administration involved and as an MP involved, as basically a financial. Yeah, or providing the financial capital to just conduct the experiments and the flights and costs for travel and so on. So and also in this case also is of the Swedish where they are all involved in the project management, so they basically lay out how the the project faces are
, which dates to use and so on. Then there comes a subcontractor, which is sort of which is the center of applied space technology in microgravity environment. They have a drop tower facility where you can do microgravity experiments. And they are also involved in the Texas and Texas program here. They basically are then advising all the teams throughout the project. And are the direct partners to talk to if there are problems. The other organizations are, of course, visible, so they are involved, for example, in the decision process, which experiments should be selected, but they are not directly involved usually in the design of the experiments. Then there still our Muradova, which is another part of are namely the mobile rocket base, they are responsible for doing the launch together with SASE, the Swedish Space Corporation, SASE owns S range, for example. So they are providing all the necessary infrastructure for the launch, the launch itself and the rocket motors and so on. So there are a couple of phases of the project, as I already mentioned. So first of all, the first step is the selection workshops. So you submitted a proposal to the Texas and Texas committee and they decide whether it looks interesting what you are doing, whether it looks feasible with given time constraints or financial constraints. And if the experiment gets selected, there are several design reviews or reviews, these are usually at the end to or at the end of one part of the project to fulfill one milestone. And they are going with increasing granularity on just the details as your project evolves. So, for example, at the preliminary design review, they are usually just the rough plan still, but not the final project yet and nothing tested yet, so to say. And so this just goes on until the bench test, for example, which is one of the tests where all the experiments are connected together and it's basically just some a couple of months before the launch campaign. So I was involved in the
 experiment we did fiber optic vibration sensing on board such a rocket, which was Rexes 15, which was also last year in summer, we were a bunch of students from the city of Munich. And basically the core team were six people, one of these students for ordinary undergraduate students and one PUCA. So the experiment involved some some laser optics or lasers and fiber optics, I could design software had to be written and so on. So. What did we want to do? So basically we used fiber optic sensors to vibration sensing and embrace and sensing means effectively measuring acceleration. So how can you use a fiber to measure something? One of these possibilities is a so-called fiber brake. Creating a fiber optic writing is in principle, a normal fiber. But what's the difference that it does not transmit all light from one end to the other, but it has an inscribed periodic change of the refractive index so that you can see with these these dishes inside the fiber. This basically make the fiber behave in a way that one specific wavelength that we call the brake wavelength is reflected to the input side. And of course, on the transmission side, you see an absorption line. So that alone would not allow us to measure anything. But this bright way of life depends on the temperature, for example. So if we increase the temperature by one Kelvin, we see a shift in the peak wavelength of this bright wavelength by 10 kilometers. And the same way if you take a one meter long fiber and expand it to buy one micrometer, you'll see also a shift in one meter of the wavelength. So this way we can, for example, attach a seismic mast to the fiber. And if force acts on the mass, we see an extension of the fiber. So the we see a shift in the wavelength. And if we follow the shift in the way of life, we can calculate the acceleration on this mass. So what are the benefits of this technology in first place? So, first of all, this allowed to build quite lightweight and the systems, if you compare th
at, for example, to normal resistive strain. GODUS We don't need isolation on the cables because this is just a fiber and we don't have any interference or electromagnetic compatibility issues with other other electronics around. Also, there are no spiric, so we can place it quite close to propellants, for example, or we could put off that. We could think of a fiber that we just put on the complete rocket and have also multiple sensors inside this fiber. And we don't get any issues with the the present parts that are around this. So. They are already exist studies and papers on how to use fiber optics or fiber optic ratings for space applications, but these are mainly lab setups. So these are not tested in flight and they are only a few examples where this was done. So we thought whether it is possible to operate such an FPGA favor by creating a measurement system on the rocket and just see how it turned out. So these were our fiber optic sensors, so the first one is the accelerations and this one is a sensor that we that we bought. We also developed our own own one, but we couldn't use it in the end. So we need to use the fallback solution. The overload capability is plus minus 53, which is important, but you will see later. Normally the rockets so there's a Texas Menuha that has several specifications on the rocket and it says that the expected maximum acceleration is about 20 or 25 to. So this should be sufficient, we thought then we also have one fiber optic, a temperature sensor that you can see here, and that's also attached nearby the reference center for the accelerometer. We also we also need a reference center, which is was a normal MEMS based electrical sensor that was placed close to the fiber optic Costanza's and a lot of other temperature sensors around the modular. So how how does such an optical system with these five Ulbrich ratings work? So first of all, we have a light source that produces a very wide band or broadband of infrared light. This was 
done by a normal pump laser and an erbium dubbed fiber. So then this very bright light goes through a five o'clock coupler and then split up into three beams that then go to each of our 3s and also to accelerate accelerometers, fiber optic ones and one temperatures. So from there, it goes through a 50 50 coupler and to the sensor. From there, the light gets reflected and goes back to the coupler and comes to a so-called interrogator Chip. The interrogator chip basically measures and the first path, it has an air field in front of of the light and a diode. And so we can measure the filter current of the diode. And we know basically that the wavelength of the grating. Because also the light source might have some fluctuations in the intensity of light that it produces, we also need a reference of the total emitted light that we received. So we also have one path without the edge filter to have an absolute number. What was the input like? Basically for four hours and. So this is such a rexes rocket. The rocket is about six meters long. Our experiment was directly under the nose cone or below the nose cone, not with not with the nose cone. The nose cone was empty. And below us, there were three other experiments. There was, for example, Medusa from the University of Rostock Ostracod are two from the University of Strathclyde and an experiment called iStock from Stockholm. And as you can see, there are some some severe parts on it. So these are hatches because all these three experiments had so-called free fall in units. These are injectables that you can eject from the rocket that then fly fly down the normal way. So these are, for example, they can be used to test tube sets, which was the case for Astrocyte. Therefore, you have this 10 to 10 centimeter hatches for four ostracod. Then there's the service module that's from Morawa and the recovery module that's also from the so every experiment gets several. Interfaces, for example, power, for example, a data downlink pr
ovided from the service module and the data is then transmitted by the service module to the ground station and then below the recovery module. There's the improved Orion Motor. So how did our experiment look like? As you can see, it is basically just this this module with three hundred fifty six millimeters in diameter and we have a power supply there and we have the light source, as I said. And from there, the light goes to the fiber couplers throughout through this beam splitter. So you can see that there are three colors and basically the black part below the orange fiber cables that are, you know, rolled up there is below the one of the one, two, three split us and then we get three output signals. So from each of the five of us, we go one or one goes to the temperatures and the other to go to the accelerometers. And from there it goes back to the five Markopoulos and one way goes, of course, back to the light source. But we ignore that and the other part goes to the interrogator trips. From there it goes onto Bisbee's through several filter stages and a microcontroller that then stops all the data on an SD card and also transmits part of it down to the ground station. So that's this onboard data handling part. So how does such a launch look like? Hi. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. And this is the view from the so-called Science Center, so there are basically two locations where you can be during such a rocket launch because they are, of course, safety regulations there. So one is the science center, which this recording comes from, which is about one kilometer away from the launch site. And then there's the so-called radar here, which is about two or more kilometers away. And. As you can see, basically from the same sentence that you don't see that much, but we also had other experiments on the rocket, so they also had a camera on board the rocket. And we can also see the view from inside the rocket to the outside. So first of all, the rocket that you see there i
s not our rocket that is flying, that was just another empty rocket that was placed there that's normally below the the tower. And they just moved away the tower of it. So the the sound in the end, you probably noticed it stopped, so first of all, you notice the spinning, which is at the rate of about four Ferhat that's just to stabilize the rocket during the flight, because as I said to this unguided, then you probably noticed that we were above the clouds after about seven seconds. And the other thing you noticed is the sound that. Somehow, it probably sounded, yeah, you probably don't know where it comes from, it's just the air that flows out of the modulus because of the lower pressure outside. So that's basically the sound that you can hear. And in the end, you also hear that there was the sound disappeared. That's because there was not enough air anymore for the microphone to. And then we have a third one, this is. So this was done by Mahaba, and so it goes. So that was another rocket, but they mounted a camera on top of the rocket launcher and. Just see how it goes. So it goes quite fast. So we had to go now to our results, we first have the temperature measurements and you can see that there's some spike from the five. So the first thing is both measurements are quite close together. So the sensing is correct, we can say. The other thing is that we noticed is that at basically liftoff time tippler, zero seconds, we have a spike in from the fiber optic Cosenza, which is basically because the fiber acts as far as an accelerometer in this case, because there's still a small mass attached to the fiber, but still it's a mass. So we can measure or we can see the acceleration inside this temperature profile. The other part is that we have the acceleration from our normal sensor and the fiber optic sensor and we see that something bad happen. So at the beginning, everything seems to fine. But then at liftoff, something changes. So what has happened? So that was the 
the flight direction, so there's that access and basically a 60 milliseconds before we get the official liftoff signal, that's the time between ignition and the rocket moves. Basically, we see a very high acceleration that exceeds our down for us for the four hour accelerometers, the fiber optic ones. And basically the sensor could not get into the old position or some parts inside were damaged. And so we had an offset of minus 23 around. But still there were some there was some signal and we can adjust it by rescaling and adjusting the offset of the fiber back to the normal profile. So we can see that we reached about a third degree of acceleration. Of course, this is outside the spec of the accelerometer. So these are not fully trustable values, but that just shows that there's quite some energy at the start at least, that exceeds the normally measured acceleration values. So the outcome was that on the one hand, we can operate such a five regulating based measurement system on this rocket, but on the other hand, there are still some problems that need to be solved or need to be avoided in the future that have to do with the issues that you normally don't see. If you sample too slow, that you can see these very high accelerations at the beginning. OK, so now I will talk about the soccer team, where a team of quite a small team of five engineering students from Ghana and the eastern part of Germany, and the basic idea behind our car was that we wanted to build an ADP receiver to place it, for example, in the A because in a densely populated area, for example, at the Atlantic. So there's no really control of the aircraft which are flying there. And the idea was that we wanted to build a small receiver which can operate, for example. And the goal was that we receive these ADP data, which are transmitted from airplanes every second, nearly every seconds during a Texas flight and wanted to test the experiment during the flight. And we choose the Texas flight because we
 had much more longer time where we can measure these airplanes. And one of the questions was we are in pretty high of 30 kilometers or so, so from which distance can we receive any airplanes anymore? So that's a very rough overview of the experiment. So we have our airplanes which are transmitting these ADP signals every second, and then we have KIOKO experiment which receives these data. We are saving the data onboard and then there's eeling, the so-called eeling module in the back balloon, and we can transmit the data back to Earth and see it in the grounds of the current station and also save the data, the. Yes, another topic, we have our ADP data, which are coming from the outside and we have at the outside of our. We have the antenna mounted and then we have the ADP receiver, which is in our module, and we have an FPGA where we do all the signal processing stuff and decoding the frames which are coming from the airplanes. And then we have a small computer which saves the data and also downlinks the data down to us. And also we could talk to experiment and set some commands during the flight. The electrical concept is relatively simple. We have an RF receiver do the data center at a frequency of around one point, one gigahertz. So we are filtering the data. We are amplification, we have an amplification stage. Then we have a few other filters and amplifiers and then we have a logarithmic detector. And the data from the logarithm detector directly is input in an ADC analog to digital converter. And then we are doing the signal processing stuff in the FPGA and the FPGA since the decoded data where a similar connection to the computer where we can save it and start data. And we had an Internet connection because the ceiling is mainly a WiFi connection, something like that. It has a little bit more power than the WiFi connection, but basically it's a WiFi connection. We had some problems with the front end. We used it on the first prototype, we used the so-called m
ini ADP. You can take a look at the entire well documented. And the problem was that there was only one amplifier and it oscillates a lot. So we split the amplification into two stages and then we had no problems with amplification and so on. And you can see here, that's our second prototype. And there are the amplification is put into two stages. And we built a base for the so-called base, but we had an FPGA on underneath it, and the base part contains the direct receiver. You can see it here. You can see here the ADC, the analog to digital converter, and that's our computer, which was also developed by us. And it was stacked on top of that. The computer was developed by Honeysett, is one of our team members during his master's thesis and runs Linux and what it was designed for low power consumption. So it also fits in our concept that we wanted to build a receiver which consumes basically nothing. Well, not really a lot of energy. And you can see here a chart where we put all together, so in total we had power consumption, less than one watt. So we think that's quite OK. But for example, we would to use the experiment during a satellite flight down the Internet connection wouldn't be needed anymore. So the power consumption could be reduced further because the Internet connection consumes the most energy in the whole experiment. Mechanical, we built quite a simple mechanical or metal box, you can see it here in the in the left where we have to connect the connectors outside from the left, the connect over the antennas mounted. Then we have the power connection. And on the right we have these on a connection and three elements where we could see some indicators or some areas. For example, when we went when the experiment was not in the. A look inside of the box, it was really only just a metal box, and we had here our our base board, our computer, and that's the connection with which goes directly in front. And here we had an IED, a material only for isolation and 
some total isolation of doing the. In October last year, the experiment experiment was started from whence you saw some pictures before, at ten fifty one we reached a floating level of around twenty eight kilometers. But we had a lot of we had a strong horizontal wind. So the balloon had to be cut down at 12 o'clock. The problem is that they are not allowed to fly in the Russian sector. So we landed or later we landed in Finland and it was good luck that we landed there. And that's a picture of our gondola. You can see here that was our small experiment. That's the power box where the batteries are located inside, and that's the so-called eeling module, which is basically a WiFi connection. And that was another experiment from, I think, Bologna and a five that they had done some metrological measurements in the atmosphere doing the floating face. Um, Tattooer says basically the experiment worked very well, we could track a lot of airplanes during the flight and in total we received around 200 thousands more text messages and in total debt, around 110 unique airplanes we could see. And the maximum distance was around six hundred twenty kilometers. But we expected more. We expected a distance from around 1100 kilometers. And the problem was that we had some drop outs with our in our air. FLINK So we think that we had the broken antenna connection with which was. Mostly likely due to a mechanical problem to transport, so. He has a picture during the flight. You can see that that was the airplane, which was from the highest distance, six hundred, 20 kilometers around, and that he in the middle, that's Cuba now and also Cuban airport. I'm in blue. We have developed most modest messages we received during the flight and at this time we had the launch and the count of Motets messages increases a lot. And then we had this degradation you can see during the flight. And we think that that's the reason because of the broken antenna connection. So from time to time, we had a lo
t of messages we received and then, for example, for two minutes due to count of messages dropped out completely or nearly completely. So we had really problems with our antenna. But all we received a lot of our and we could say, OK, the experiment is working well, actually. Terms of the behavior, the monitored six Equador courtesy sensors in the experiment to monitor the temperature and at the launch pad, and during the experiment when it was on the launch pad, the temperature rises and then, of course, we are the balloon was rising and the temperature was rising until around the outside temperature at minus 40 degree. And then the gondola was moving slowly into the sun and then the sun was shining directly on our experiment. So the temperature rises again. OK, so we made a short. Timelapse move? No, I've no real movie of the launch and nobody in the team had a movie of the balloon start, but we made a short time lapse, we can see. Here in the bright yellow cards, how colors, how colors is the launch vehicle address, which you can see the gondola which is mounted there, and the balloon is on the left. OK, during after the flight, we replayed all the data we received and made a small time lapse movie where you can see the airplanes flying around Sweden and Norway. Dancers and singers, for example, to show you only one thing is, for example, UFC Akuna Airport and you see airplanes which are flying to CUNA land and fly again. And of course, you can see a lot of airplane routes or streets in the air, which you can which we could track during the whole flight. OK, and if you have or if you want to build an experiment and you want to participate in the works aspects of the program, you may be ask yourself now, how could I do that? And we think the first idea is that you have to get an idea. And we have only written some questions down. For example, was the experiment in similar kind already flown? Can we improve the early experiment which was flown some years ago or so a
gain? And we need external support, which is critical for your experiment. For example, do we need any labs which cannot cannot be provided by the suspects program or do we need external finance support and so on, so on? And we think that it's in the first hand. It's important that you find people who are motivated to work in this project, for example, because those projects are running for around 10 or 11 months, whereas rexes programs are running for 12 months, No. 13, 18 months. So that's a lot of time. And you have to do it, or mostly all during the during your study at university. So you also need people who are motivated at very important thing in the works aspects of the program. And we can say from previous experiments, mostly the problem is that the people lost the team or left the team and the team had a lot of problems with the workload, which has to be done until the launch campaign. So the next possibility to try to call for proposal or two to write a paper for the selection workshop opens in summer 2016. And for German students, you should you must not. But you should write a letter of intent until the beginning of August next year. And for European students, they should register at the Education Project database and write down that they want to participate in the program. And for details you should see at Suspects Stuxnet, because there's everything listed and you can read it later. OK, some acknowledgments we have the first team that were the team members of the first team A. We were this team thanks to the guys who brought us these images and so on. And the videos you saw, for example, from Derek Subcircuit, we are from the Isaach experiment and from Guillaume Awaba. And if you read if you want to read a little bit more, we have some Web pages written down and if you have questions. Also talk to us later or let us an email. To have some time left, five minutes, 15 on the thank you. Yeah. Yes. OK, so we can show just a few images from the campaign an
d then we do a Q and A, so this is the team photo of the rexes, 15 and 16 teams that were that were there. So you see, these are quite a lot of people involved. And these were only the people that were sent to the launch campaign that may be or they are even more people involved in the project itself. And this is, again, the photo, but for us, 18 and 19. So, again, a lot of people yeah, well. Maybe we can we can open for a Q and A.. Thank you very much for the phone. Please give them a warm applause. If you have any questions, please line up at the four microphones we have here while you're doing this off to the signal Angel relaying a question from Iasi. We currently have a question regarding funding and regarding the costs involved with launches. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on the costs for launching with rexes of Texas, maybe cost per kilogram also and the total funding for such a launch? So I don't know the total funding, but the launch itself is free. So that's paid by the suspects us. So that's free for the teams, basically what the teams have to pay or not. The teams also get some money, for example, to build the modules and some specific parts that are built, for example, by his arm or by other companies where you just buy these things and everything that exceeds that amount. I don't have an exact figure a couple of thousand euros that then has to be paid by your own or you have to develop it by your own or you need a lab of your university or some some machines of your university so that you can can just see. Where you can get other support or other sponsors for these parts. The question from the front, right microphone. OK. OK, hello, I have a question regarding the fiber optic measurements you did, because you explained that it has some advantages, for example, that it can be built very lightweight. Now, my question is, did your experiments had or do you hope that your experiment will have some effect on the development of these measurement systems for 
actual emissions from NASA or the DLR, for example, some kind of fiber optic measurements being done on? So what what lies in the future? So I don't know of any specific plans or things, but so we see that there are some problems with the fiber optics. But in total, due to the due to that, that you don't need no more isolation from the of the fibers compared to electrical cables so that there might be some some programs, but nothing specific that I know of. Can I ask a follow up question is not one. Can you give a rough estimate on how much weight you can save in comparison to the models used currently for measurement. Not by heart. Sorry. Okay. Thank you. From left microphone. Hi, thanks for the talk. I'm interested in some numbers for both Texas and Texas. What's the kind of flight duration you can achieve and what about the maximum altitude? Yeah, so the altitude I think we had on the on the slide is for the Texas rockets, about 80 or 70 to 90 km. So it depends, of course, on the mass of the rocket. And usually you try to get all the experiments that started for this rocket also on the rocket that you don't have to fly an empty experiment. So therefore, you probably just take away some of the heat and just take the the heavier experiment. But so our flight, because all our modules were quite heavy, our flight was only up to eighty eight point seven kilometers. But the our sister Flight 16 was to 86 or 87 kilometers. A question from our signal angel on Iasi, somebody wanted to know what happens to the rocket when it reaches its high point, the highest altitude, does it come back can sometimes be used for things like that. So the 80 kilometers are not sufficient to get the experiments into orbit. So basically everything falls down again. There will be or usually there's a motor separation, so the motor falls down before the payload and then sometime later the payload comes down again. This is so that the payload falls back on on a parachute. And you can see that he
re how it looks like after this couple of slides. So that's just the payload without the the motor. That's how it is mounted on the on the launcher. And that's basically how it's how those 15 came back from a left microphone. I think you missed some of my question. I also wanted to know about the flight duration of Texas and Texas as well. So the Texas flight this hour, three minutes up and then probably about, I think, eight minutes or so down, but most of the time it's on the parachute. So that's nothing special anymore happening. Texas is a little bit complicated to say. So, for example, how long? Our flight was only about two hours or so. But for example, one of the last Texas flight, which flight this year in October this year, that a very long flight because there were no horizontal winds. So there are pictures where the balloon was launched two hours ago and they could take a photo from the launch pad where the balloon was visible in 30 kilometers height. So it could be quite long. And it depends on the horizontal winds, for example, and also on the constraints of the experiments. Some experiments wants to want to have a long duration of measurement and some experiments want to have a slower duration of flight of floating because, for example, they only want to take measurements in the rising and falling. Are there any more questions? It does not look like that, so please give a warm round of applause to penitents.