Integration 2018

It's difficult to believe that Integration was a week ago! We have been preparing for that week since December and it all feels a bit like a blur right now. 

This year we still had to get all the gear and all the people from across the East coast all the way to Houston, Texas at about the same time. We left in the evening instead of the early morning but because of storms in the area it still ended up being a long trek.

When we pack for Integration we try to bring everything we think we might need. All of that gear PLUS enough clothes for a week makes for a lot of luggage. 

Setherton and I left NC around 2 pm and made it to Houston around 11 pm. Then we waited for Dan and Jimmy who were also delayed by storms.

Then the entire crew loaded into a Nissan Armada and I drove us to Palestine, Texas where we arrived at around 3:30 am. 

We slept for a minute or two and then headed to CSBF at about 9 am. 

The whole first day and much of the first night was spent getting RAM in ship shape. 

This year all of the teams were in the hangar together...about 80 people...so space was tight. The cool thing was that we got to know a lot of the other teams. Groups socialized more in general and we soon gained a reputation for having bits and pieces of gear that folks could borrow. We appreciated the chance to return the favor to the teams that we borrowed parts from last year.

After giving RAM a haircut, and cutting out some...ok most...of our cameras, we were ready to integrate. This year that went a lot more smoothly!

Everyone was interested to meet Lil Vince and even Dr. Guzik seemed thrilled by our project. 

We took a quick celebratory selfie with the CSBF launch pad behind us. (MEELIONS OF FIRE ANTS.)

After we integrated it was time for some food and sleep! We  took naps and went to one of the BBQ places that the guys loved last year and it was NOT GOOD. They were incredibly disappointed. We also went to Lowes and while Jimmy looked for parts we took advantage of the comfy seats and free wifi.

We were back at it bright and early on Friday morning for the thermal vacuum test.

One of the other people on center had an HD camera that needed to be tested and it was decided (squee!!) that the camera would be focused on RAM for the entirety of the test. It looked phenomenal AND it gave us instant eyes on the progress of our payload as it ran through the paces during the thermal/vac cycle. Normally we'd be mostly blind during the test or relying on our on-board cameras. It sounds like we might even get the star treatment during the flight too!

Down time during the testing meant that we could catch up on paperwork, applications, intern posters, smaller tasks and harassing Dan by putting sweetened corn snacks in his precious trail mix.

The problem with having a camera watching your every move is that everyone gets to see (live and in color!) when your robotic arm makes a swan dive and grinds itself to a halt...with fifteen minutes left in the test. Our low stress mood also ground to a halt.

As soon as the arm came out of the chamber the guys got to work on it to try to figure out what the problem was. Jimmy's done a better job writing up the issue in the previous entry, but the basic idea is that we killed a servo somehow. We scrambled to order another one at 4:30 pm on a Friday and were promised that we'd have a new servo in hand by noon on Saturday.

At about noon on Saturday I checked the tracking on our package and it said that we could expect delivery to be on time by the end of the day on Monday. At the end of the day on Monday we'd be past our testing window and back on a plane to home. Suffice it to say we were pretty upset.

But Saturday was also the day that the other part of the team landed in Texas and drove out to CSBF. Murr and Jimichael certainly boosted morale. 

They got the extra treat of seeing a man walking down the road pick up a snake and throw it. Welcome to Texas.

After dinner we did two things that Seth had wanted to do all week long.

We went out to the launch pad at CSBF at night to see the stars. The long trek through the dark was magical and we were all the right sort of slap happy and silly. We were joined by the ghost of an old prospector!



And then the guys all met in the hotel conference room to play Star Craft. They had two nights of am inter-generational grudge match tournament and I don't know who won or if anyone won or whatever...but I know that the Olds cheated a little bit.

Sunday we started out a little bit bummed because we knew that we weren't going to be participating in the T/V test but we showed up to work on site and keep track of what the other teams were doing. 

In the middle of the day we found out that we'd passed the first test and we were approved for flight! 

And we even had a visit from Space Pup and Son of Space Pup!

Sunday night we left CSBF in Palestine, Texas for what might be the last time. I didn't think about that while it was happening. At the time we were just excited to go to Houston and visit Johnson on Monday.* I hope that at some point in the not too distant future that at least one of us gets to go back to CSBF. The ballooning community is pretty tight knit so it's not too far fetched to think that one of the members of tUR will be back. And who knows...there's always a third year of HASP to think about. We've joked that we'll field a consortium from UMD, UC Boulder and Houston (All schools that already have HASP teams and all schools that tUR could realistically have students matriculating at.)

But that's all in the distant future. On the Close Horizon (inside joke) we have RAM3 launching from Fort Sumner at the end of the month to look forward to! A new school year! Possible new jobs for team members!

Stay tuned. Same Space Cat time. Same Space Cat channel.


*I'll let someone else post about Best NASA since I can't take credit for any of the photos.

Origins and Status of RAM

[Dan and I] are back in Maryland for the final push; RAM successfully integrated and is cleared for flight, but we haven't had the time for our entire software team (read: Dan) to actually, you know, write and test the software for flight. We have 16 days before 'pencils-down' and we ship to New Mexico. This is a rigid due date, so we're in a stringent hardware lock even though we ended up pulling a lot of our camera system out in order to duck some power-brownout issues that surfaced recently. We'll (I'll) have to clamp down on any (my) temptations to try and sneak features or components back in.

RAM is working again, resurrected and reassembled. We burned out one of our critical servos due to some bad commanding, but swapped components to get us limping along again (though with a dead gripper, as shown in the video below.) By this evening we'll have a fresh one swapped in and will be back to full functionality.

Here's a click-through link in case the embedding doesn't work.

One of the big hopes we had for flight was to run completely autonomously, letting cameras and computers and reference tags (the blocky black-and-white bits in the picture below) do all the driving. For some of the reasons mentioned above as well as some other schedule slips -- most of them mine -- we haven't been able to develop that control feedback system to the level we'd want for flight. 

Because everyone loves a picture of a picture, this is the BusyBox from inside the vacuum chamber, as captured by a high-resolution CSBF camera and output to a laptop over radio link. Thanks to Chris Field for letting us piggyback on his beautiful imagery system.

However, we're still on track for an exciting flight! We're shifting to doing most of our driving by 'dead reckoning', i.e. with absolutely-referenced instructions sent from on board. Rather than reacting in real-time, the arm will be moving -- blind, but moving -- to manipulate all the components on our 'Busy Box' using explicit commands we plan out for it. We'll see if we can get some lighter test elements working and tested well enough for flight, but right now we need to keep focused on the minimum deliverable of a working arm.

Thanks again to Peter Sooy for inviting us up to Goddard way back in December of last year; the information we learned during that visit helped inform the shape of the project that we're mere weeks away from launching into near-space. Thanks also to Zakiya Tomlinson for fielding all of our questions and showing us the ropes. And, finally, thanks to the patient HASP ground crews from LSU and CSBF for hosting us last week: Dr. T. G. Guzik, Doug Granger, Josh Collins, and Anthony Ficklin were all more than accommodating and gave us everything we needed to succeed. And, last but far from least, thanks to NC Space Grant for their continuous support and funding; we couldn't do this without y'all!

Just go ahead and jump.

With HASP Integration looming on the horizon, I thought I'd make a little something for tUR to remind them how far we've come with this project.

Minintegration at Langley

In about a week we'll be getting on a plane bound for Houston, Texas with the ultimate destination of the Columbia Scientific Ballooning Facility in Palestine, Texas for integration. If you weren't following us for integration last year it is a very stressful week where we make sure that the payload that we have been building will meet all of the requirements for HASP,  won't blow the HASP fuse, and that it will survive the heat, cold, and low pressure of space. 

Last week we had what we call Minintegration. This is where we run through all of the testing that we will encounter at real integration. Last year we went to NASA Goddard  for mini. This year we went to Langley! When we toured LaRC way back in December we noticed that they had thermal vacuum chambers and asked (the lovely and brilliant) Kristyn Damadeo if they ever let student groups visit and use them. She promised to look into it for us and connected us with Mark Thornblom. A few conference calls later and we had a spot testing our payload in a real testing facility at NASA.

Of course, anything beyond our glorified tamale pot/incubator testing rig is a lot of pressure (metaphorically...literally the point is that it's NOT a lot of pressure) so we wanted to make sure we put our best foot forward. We've been working at DSBF and DCSBF to get everything up to flight ready.

The Charm, Smooth and I drove up to Virginia on Sunday. We were waiting around at our terrible hotel for Jimmy to bring the payload. Memes and Jimmy were just adding some finishing touches when an essential component shorted out.  Everyone scrambled to find a quick replacement but the types of things we need aren't sold at Target and it was difficult to find anything available that would get to us in time. Jimmy's family was pressed into service to source parts in neighboring cities. This delay lead to more delays and soon it was evening. After a quick leadership chat we decided that it made more sense for us to meet halfway between Hampton and Greenbelt to trade off the payload so I found a Sheetz that was open 24/7 and we made a plan to drive to the middle of nowhere at 11 pm. We hopped back into the car at 9 pm and arrived at the Sheetz ahead of schedule, texted DCSBF to see what they had as an ETA...and...they hadn't left yet. 

Many, many, many polite, delicate, professional, and lady-like words later...we were back on the road...to Maryland. We arrived at DCSBF at about 12:44 AM.

In spite of the late hour, or perhaps because of how loopy we all were, we were still jubilant to be reunited with our teammates. After some quick instructions and a flurry of tetris style packing we were back in the car for the 3.5 hour drive back to Virginia. We got back around 4 AM, fell into bed, and then got up bright and early to meet Mark and test RAM!

But then...somehow...we got lost twice on the way to Langley and ended up being late.

All of these delays paid off because we expelled all of our bad luck at the beginning of the week. From that point on it was smooth sailing.

Seth got promoted to Integration Team Lead with only a short amount of time to prepare. He was anxious about the prospect of being in charge of the project since he came on board late but he rose to the challenge. He spent most of the downtime on this trip reviewing videos, sifting for tasks, and listening to the dulcet tones of Space Viking. 

Meanwhile, Smooth jumped in and took over the assembly. We had a few tiny tweaks to make to RAM before we could pop it in the chamber.

Mark Thornblom was a fantastic host and made us feel right at home in his testing facility. He helped us unload, gave us a safety briefing, and then basically remained at our beck and call for the rest of our time there. Everyone we met was incredible and so many people came by because they were excited to meet RAM.

Blue is RAM's color.

The serious overtime that Dan and Jimmy put in was worth it because RAM did everything it was supposed to do, perfectly, on the first try. They made us look good! After we got everything ready for the test we adjourned for the day and headed to our new luxurious hotel , took naps, waited for Jim Mike, and then ate at an all you can eat sushi place for dinner.

After a gloriously restorative night of sleep in huge, fluffy beds we went back to LaRC and started our first round of thermal vac testing with a bake at 55 degree Celsius. RAM had a test cycle to run through that needed to be re-started every once in a while but mainly we spent the day watching, waiting, and hoping everything continued to work.

We had lunch in the cafeteria and the guys discovered the Black Hole. This abomination of a sandwich is composed of a hamburger patty, topped with chicken tenders, and covered in BBQ.

 I suggested that they add another layer of sweet potato tater tots...because why not. 

The afternoon passed as you might expect. I had another engagement at the National Institute of Aerospace but the rest of the testing in the afternoon was blessedly free of incident. The guys even got to see the ISS downlink. 

With a successful day of testing cleared we decided to treat ourselves to a fancy dinner at the Deadrise and a relaxing evening exploring the waterfront. Hampton, VA is gorgeous! None of these photos are edited.

Wednesday we were back at it, this time we were chilling the payload down to to -55 C. 

Seth had a light lunch to make up for everything he ate the day before.

We took a tour of a few testing facilities that I couldn't photograph and even more people came by to visit RAM. 

Here's a graph that shows all of the paces that we put RAM through over the week.

Seth and Spencer had an opportunity to help Mark by designing a bracket for the testing chamber. 

We passed cryo with no issues, so then it was time for our nemesis, oscilloscope testing!! We let the payload come back up to ambient conditions, ran a quick open door test, and then hauled it all out of the chamber. Jim Mike had been training for this moment for a month. 

We had one mysterious issue where the arm went limp and power dropped suddenly that James thinks might be related to the strong magnet on his watch band. Other than that the readings were quiet....too quiet. 

Jim Mike did a great job on the oscilloscope considering he was basically under a microscope while he was working. The PR interns came to visit during this period and took a bunch of glamour shots of RAM. 

When testing was over we said tearful goodbyes to Mark and his team. We are so thankful to have this opportunity to test because it means that we are in a much better position to go into Integration with confidence. We were told that we got lucky that our timing coincided so well with a period where Mark needed to do some testing of the chamber but we know that all of the credit goes to Mark for scrambling to find a creative way to make this happen for us. Testing is challenging at a small community college where we don't have access to facilities and we can't afford to pay to have our payloads tested. Stakes are also higher for us because what money we do have to spend on projects is very carefully doled out, and finding payload errors at the last minute could tank our whole mission! 

The guys went South to NC and I headed North back to Maryland to bring RAM back to Memes and SV. They had scheduled a time to have some EE interns visit and do some more scope testing, just to see if we could really find any issues, and all was quiet on the Western front once again.

I was also pleased because I got to see Jimmy give his laser activity presentation to a live audience and visit with his wee-tiny-baby sister.

(And astronaut Ricky Arnold.)

So now we're back at DSBF printing everything in kynar while the DCSBF team clocks in for more late nights to get everything perfected for Integration!