Iris is IrishSat’s High-Altitude Balloon (HAB) project.
This past year, we changed directions a bit to compete in NASA’s FLOATing DRAGON competition (https://floatingdragon.nianet.org/).
- The challenge was to design and submit a proposal for a system that could deploy from a large HAB and autonomously steer to a selected waypoint on the ground.
- The goal of this is to be able to have very long-term balloons that collect large amounts of data that is too much to transmit, so they need a reliable way to drop hard drives of data in a safe way that they won’t land in a populated area or somewhere where it could be lost.
Over 60 universities entered the competition, and our team was selected as 1 of 6 finalists!
University Finalists Selected for New NASA Balloon Challenge
The rest of last year, we built and tested a system and in August, Sarah and Patrick went to a NASA BPO (Balloon Program Office) launch site in Fort Sumner, NM to integrate with NASA and launch our hardware on one of their HAB’s!
Unfortunately, the FAA pulled approval for the drops at the last minute, so we will not get to actually test our system – but that is something that we are hoping to do ourselves this fall!
IrishSat 