I defended my engineering thesis at Gdańsk University of Technology. It closes my studies in Automatic Control and Robotics at the Faculty of Electrical and Control Engineering. The supervisor was dr inż. Daniel Wachowiak. The thesis is in Polish, with the title "Stardust - Stratosferyczna platforma eksperymentalna" (Stardust - Stratospheric experiment platform).
The thesis describes the electronics that controlled the Stardust microbiological experiment. You can read about the experiment in my post about BEXUS. It flew on the BEXUS 30 balloon from Esrange Space Center in Sweden on 30 September 2021.
The thesis covers:
- The concept of the Stardust mission, the SimLE Science Club and the REXUS/BEXUS programme.
- The design of the electronics: the microcontroller, the communication system, the memory, the sensors, the power supply, the control of the pumps, the heaters and the servos, and the current measurement.
- The design of four printed circuit boards: the power board, the logic board, the experiment board and the sensor board.
- The fabrication, soldering, assembly and tests of the boards.
- The data from the 2020 test mission and from the BEXUS 30 flight.
Two results from the flight data are interesting. During the July 2020 test flight in Poland, the sensors inside the experiment measured more than 50 °C. The thermal insulation kept in the heat from the pumps and the electronics, which operated all the time. The pressure data also shows why a simple pressure altimeter is not accurate in the stratosphere.
Read the full thesis: Stardust - Stratosferyczna platforma eksperymentalna (PDF, 5.6 MB, in Polish).
Update, November 2022: The thesis received the third-degree award in the fifth edition of the competition for the Award of the President of the Polish Space Agency (POLSA) for the best diploma thesis in space research, in the category of engineering theses. Read the news from Gdańsk Tech.