Well its been less then twenty four hours since our finals ended, and already members of the CrawSat III team and Launch Personnel team are back to work on the balloon preparing for the launch on December 18th, 2010.

Today we performed the second Cold Test, with improvements to testing procedures to account for lack of circulation of cold air through the Thermovac chamber. With the additions of a fan and dehydrator to the chamber, we were successfully able to circulate cold air throughout the chamber, and verify the electronics are well insulated and ready to handle the cold wrath of the jet stream on flight day, thanks to the Mechanical Team!

We have uploaded photos from today’s test to the CAPE Gallery.

- The team monitoring the Thermovac during the cold test.

- The dehydrator attached to thermovac.

- Display of data from the ground station received from the package.

All photos can be found here.

Also in addition, heres a little fun tidbit. Using some nifty weather balloon flight prediction software, we have predicted the balloon to land on the levee south of I-10, here.

Expect some post through out the week with new predictions as we get closer to launch day and more updates!

Saturday, November 6th, 2010, the CrawSat III team met to test the balloon package in the Thermovac Chamber for how well the package stood against extreme cold temperatures, and pressure changes. The test was not successful due to coding errors with the newly integrated Northside arduino package, and with pushing the liquid nitrogen from the base of the vacumm’s chamber up to the rest of the chamber, leaving most of the balloon package relatively warm. The team has been since working towards correcting these problems, while also revising the mechanical structure. Thus far the coding issues appear to be fixed.

Special thanks to Dr. August Gallo and the Chemistry Department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for supplying us Liquid Nitrogen and Alex Wehmann from the Northside Arduino Team and his family for coming out to watch the test take place.

Below are pictures from the cold test experiment:

- Night before test, making last minute fixes to the balloon package and code

- CrawSat III team shows Alex Wehmann from Northside Highschool the code for the project.

- Running the thermovac chamber

- Some of the Team watching the beacon coming over the radio from inside the vacuum.

- Taking a break after a long day of work.

Cold Test Run 2 will be scheduled within the next week. So stay tuned! :-