BEXUS 20 and 21 balloon launch campaign about to start
This year’s BEXUS launch campaign is starting today, 2 October, with the students travelling to the SSC Esrange Space Center in Northern Sweden. Tomorrow morning the preparation of the stratospheric balloon experiments will begin, and the first launch opportunity will be on Wednesday 7 October, followed by the second one on Thursday 8 October.
BEXUS 20 will accommodate three university student experiments. HACORD, from Belgium, will be measuring the flux and angular distribution of cosmic rays at different altitudes. COSPA, from Germany, will be collecting stratospheric aerosol particles for a better understanding of the development of polar stratospheric clouds, and CPT-SCOPE, from Norway and Germany, will be studying energetic sub-atomic particles such as electrons and protons in the stratosphere.
The BEXUS 21 payload will be composed of three university student experiments. FREDE2015, from Poland, will be studying the disintegration phenomenon of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s). SPADE, from Spain, will be testing a low-cost real time data acquisition platform for stratospheric exploration missions based on commercial off-the-shelf hardware, and InTex, from Germany, will be developing a novel technology for inflating antenna structures in space.
Follow us on Facebook for daily updates and photos. If you want to get a feel of what a BEXUS launch campaign is like, have a look at this video! (hyperlink to video)
The REXUS/BEXUS programme is realised under a bilateral Agency Agreement between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB). Through the collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), the Swedish share has been made available to students from all ESA Member or Cooperating States. EuroLaunch, the cooperation between the Esrange Space Center of SSC and the Mobile Rocket Base (MORABA) of DLR, is responsible for the campaign management and operations of the launch vehicles. Experts from DLR, SSC, ZARM, and ESA provide technical and logistic support to the student teams throughout the project.
