Welcome to the SSCL
News and Upcoming Events
Congratulations to the HABET team for breaking their altitude record. The highest we had flown a balloon was 118,352 feet ASL. On September 5th, HABET Flight L-100-D achieved 121,793 feet ASL. Nationwide this now puts in having the 5th highest altitude achieved with High Altitude Balloons.
On that same day, the HABET team also flew a second flight, HABET Flight LX-120-A, that recorded video at 720p resolution at 60 frames per second and took digital photos with a 6 megapixel camera. This was a test of the hardware that will be used to obtain high quality still photographs and video. The test was very successful and photographs and video were taken up to 93,000 feet. The pictures can be found the Media Gallery under Mission 120. Video from the flight should be posted soon.
Upcoming Events
HABET Flight L-112-B was postponed and is now scheduled for Dec. 18th. This will be the last flight for the Fall 2009 semester. Flights for the Spring 2010 semester should be announced in January.
Welcome to the new website for the Space Systems and Controls Lab (SSCL) at Iowa State University. This website contains information on the various projects that we do here in the SSCL. From sea to space, our lab has built and tested various platforms for both academic and scientific missions. We have a long history of carrying out a large variety of missions as well as supporting the academic needs of our students.
Please use the Main Menu bar to the left for navigating our website. Please be sure to check out our Media Gallery for photos, videos and audio files. Enjoy your visit to our website.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, oh my!
The SSCL is now on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the Near Space Network.
Join us over in Facebook at our Facebook group.
We plan to Twitter on some of our activities and HABET missions as well. For the very latest, follow us on Twitter
We have a large collection of videos, and we have been uploading more every week to YouTube. We have a number of videos from our HABET flights, LABET, and other projects in the SSCL
The Near Space Networks is a new social network just for high altitude balloon flights. Please join us in our group over there.
SSCL News
Current events for the Space Systems and Controls Lab
CySAT Students travel to Utah for conference
July 22nd 2009 - The ISU CySAT team will be traveling to Logan, Utah to attend the 23rd annual SmallSat conference. The conference is geared for individuals, groups, universities and businesses that work on small satellites like the cubesats which is what CySAT is currently working. The students attending will be able to interact with other universities, businesses and other people directly involved with sattellite technology. In addition, the students will be able to see papers and presentations on the latest news and technology in small sattelites. Funding for the students travel was given in part by the Aerospace Engineering Department and the SSCL.
Links of interest
HABET Group finishes wheat rust experiments
The High Altitude Balloon Experiments in Technology group at the SSCL is nearlly complete with it's imaging and spore trapping experiment that was worked on in conjunction with Dr. Forrest Nutter and his team. Currently the HABET team has done 14 flights. Two of those flights had to be aborted early due to poor weather conditions. Only one flight remains which will capture spore data as the wheat field is mowed down. The team has gathered hundreds of images of the wheat field both in the normal visible light range and in the near infrared range. These images will then be used by Dr. Nutter's team to analyze when and where the field was innoculated with the wheat rust. In addition, the spore trap data along with the images will give Dr. Nutter's team valuable information on the spreading of the wheat rust in the field.
The SSCL also presented a poster at the Northern Midwest ASP conference that was held here in Ames, IA. That poster can be found at our website under Research And Papers.
