Speaker
Description
The Earth has a wide range of environmental factors that enable complex biological life to exist. The conditions at higher altitudes of the atmosphere not only imply comparable environmental conditions as those of land surfaces of certain planets, but also prove to be a site of meteorite showers, resulting in an abundance of cosmic dust and micrometeorite pieces. It is desirable to collect this dust and examine it on the ground to understand its nature in the perspective of extraterrestrial life and the significance of its composition by concentrating research on cosmic dust in the upper stratosphere between 30 km and 40 km in altitude.
To accomplish the objective of retrieving this dust, a mechanical payload is created with a very practical approach, allowing the payload design to serve as an easily replicable, inexpensive, structurally sound, safe, and co-integrated module in balloon flight missions for collecting the micrometeorite dust. The collector is built with the safety measures to withstand impact pressures and simultaneously safeguard the collected media. The entire design was created in-house and is entirely novel, with modifications made to the materials chosen for weight reduction and stress reduction of all kinds. This research has also included material testing with production procedures for redesigned payload parts. The development of a whole module, including manufacturing and testing, will serve as a comprehensive tool for routinely carrying out higher atmospheric studies. An engineering prototype for high-altitude dust collection is built and tested, and a microcontroller board with the necessary sensors (GPS, barometer, etc.) is designed and programmed (in C language) to open and close the collector tray at an appropriate height ~ 25 km. The opening and closing of the tray attached to the collector were tested in a chamber at an ambient temperature of -80℃. For our sample collector, the embedded device platform Arduino Uno serves as the primary controller, where the C language is used to write the implementation code. The collector measures altitude using a GPS module and a BMP180 pressure sensor that are both connected to the Arduino board. The dust collection and accurate identification of the material is the primary objective of this mission in which the study techniques are split into physical and biological categories.
| Presentation type | Oral |
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