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SETH will conquer the sky!

SETH was successfully accepted for the 16 cycle of the BEXUS programme! We are very happy about the acceptance and are looking forward to the new year. Many thanks to @germanaerospacecenter for this great opportunity.
Next up is the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) in February. For this, we are travelling all the way to the south of Germany and are going to Oberpfaffenhofen as a team to present our current status. We will have more meetings in the course of the year, which we will of course keep you informed about.

Finally, in autumn this year, we will head to Kiruna, Sweden, for the flight campaign, where SETH will conquer the skies!

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SETH at DLR Bonn

On Monday, November 25th 2024, SETH presented their experiment proposal to an international board of experts who will decide if we are chosen for BEXUS cycle 16.

We believe the presentation went well, as the ensuing discussion featured mostly content related questions and no critical remarks that showed scepticisim by the board.

We also had the opportunity to hear the proposals of all other REXUS and BEXUS candidates and wish everyone the best of luck and hope they will be accepted.

The decision which experiments will receive DLR support and are accepted for the BEXUS mission will be published until the 18th of december when the invites for the preliminary design review, as well as the student training week are sent out.

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CHAOS Passes on the Torch…

CHAOS successfully launched as part of the stratospheric balloon mission BX35 on the 2nd October 2024. At the moment, we are in the middle of the data evaluation and the first results look very promising. In January, we have to submit our final results which will mark the end of CHAOS as part of BEXUS.

But Kiel University is not done yet. Currently, a new team of students is forming to apply to the next BEXUS cycle with the instrument SETH. So, CHAOS is passing on the torch. And fittingly, SETH is the Egyptian god of CHAOS…

You can find some photos from CHAOS’s launch campaign in Kiruna, Sweden below.

Team CHAOS in front of the BX35 gondola.

The BX35 balloon during the launch.

CHAOS on the gondola during recovery.

The new mission logo of SETH.

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CHAOS in Esrange

On friday the first members of team CHAOS arrived at Esrange Space Center. After getting security badges and a light dinner, everyone went to sleep excited for the first day!

Many tests were planned for the weekend which required us to mount CHAOS to the gondola and test the E-Link system with which we shall communicate during flight. CHAOS passed all individual tests with flying colors which meant we had some free time on sunday morning to go dor a short hike with the whole team.

We are now excited to see the results of todays interference test where the compatibility of all experiments on the gondola running at the same time is checked.

First meterological reports show a possible launch window on wednesday with ground winds at 1 m/s SW and higher altitude winds at 5 m/s SW.

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EAR passed!

Last week a few of our group went to Bremen, Germany, to complete the last milestone before the Launch Campaign – the Experiment Acceptance Rewiev and the Thermal Vacuum Test at ZARM. We arrived on Sunday evening and set up our experiment first thing Monday morning in the thermal vacuum chamber.

We then ran a temperature and pressure profile similar to what we expect during the flight: the pressure went down to 10 mbar and the inside of the chamber was cooled to -50°C. Our experiment measured reliably throughout. We were also able to test our insulation for the first time.

The flight software worked as well, it shuts off the high voltage when the balloon descends and pressure rises above 800 mbar.

At ZARM in Bremen, they have a large drop tower that allows for experiments in microgravity. Interestingly, a colleague who completed his diploma at the university of Kiel some years ago, was there as well, and we were able to see their experiment in microgravity.

Since there were no complications during our test, we had some time to explore Bremen on Monday. On Tuesday, we had the Experiment Acceptance Review (EAR), the final review before the flight, during which our experiment was officially approved. It is now being shipped from ZARM to Kiruna.

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IPR completed!

The next milestone on the road to the CHAOS launch is completed. On July 30th, two experts from ZARM visited us in Kiel to check on our integration process. We told them about the changes we have made since the CDR in Nordwijk and shown them our assembled instrument. The successful integration took place around two weeks ago, where we assembled the sensor head as well as the electronics to form a successfully measuring instrument. We are currently running a lot of test measurements to fully understand the instrument since it is the first time that an instrument-design as such has been integrated.

This current progress was presented to the experts from ZARM who were happy with the status. We hope to get the official pass soon. Then, the next step is the thermal vacuum test and the EAR (experiment acceptance review) at ZARM in Bremen, Germany in the first week of September. Until then, we will finalize the integration process and continue with the testing to minimize errors. Stay tuned for the journey!

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BGO Simulations

The sensor head of our CHAOS experiment contains various different detector types. One of them is the Bismuth-Germanium-Oxide (BGO) scintillator. We want to observe galactic cosmic rays. When the particles travel through the scintillator, photons are created. These mass-less, charge-less and super fast photons are the particle manifestation of light. They propagate through the BGO and are measured at two photodiodes glued to the outside surfaces of the BGO. But how exactly do they propagate through the scintillator? And what factors influence the signal yield at the photodiodes? Investigating this is the subject of my bachelor’s thesis, in which I wrote a Python-based program that simulates the photons’ path through the scintillator. Stay tuned for the results.

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CDR passed!

From 15th to 17th May 2024, we went to ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre) in Noordwijk, Netherlands. There we had our CDR (Critical Design Review). Again, we presented progress we made on our experiment to the review board, which was made up of experts from DLR, ESA, ZARM and SSC. Even though the board had some useful comments and tips for us, we passed the review, and our experiment design was accepted. Now, we can focus all our efforts on integrating the CHAOS instrument. The next milestone will be the IPR (Integration Progress Review) at the end of July. Two experts from ZARM will visit us in Kiel and inspect the integration process.

Although it was an exhausting couple of days, we had a lot of fun in the Netherlands and used the time to explore the cities of Leiden and Amsterdam. Stay tuned for more information on CHAOS!