Skycademy Update

The last month here at Pi Towers has been a busy one, as we’ve been preparing for our first ever Skycademy event. Since announcing it a couple of months ago we’ve had a great response from educators and youth leaders looking to run their own high-altitude project.

Having only ever done one launch myself, the team and I decided that a practice run was necessary. So back in July we invited Dave Akerman up to Cambridge and launched, chased and recovered our own payload. The whole experience was shared via Twitter.

From launch…

…throughout the flight…

…to recovery.

We even got to traipse through a ditch (an obligatory part of any HAB recovery surely?)

IMAG0310

The day was great and now were really excited to be repeating the experience with our 24 Skycademy attendees, who will join us next week from the 24th – 26th. Some of them have been quite excited too…

The plan for the three days is loosely as follows:

  • Day 1 – Orientation, training and preparation
  • Day 2 – A series of flights launched by the teams (from approximately 10:30 onwards)
  • Day 3 – Review, evaluation and planning future launches.

If you would like to follow what’s going on over the three days you can do so by keeping an eye on the #skycademy hashtag on Twitter, where you’ll find out how to track the payloads using links that we will share on the day.

Also keep an eye on the hourly predictions for landing sites. Let’s hope conditions improve a little, or we’ll all need boats!

 

 

 

3 comments

Avatar

Fun stuff! I wonder how accurate the ground track predictions end up being, on average?

Avatar

We shall be FASCINATED to find out. (On balloon-following missions I’ve attended, the predictions have been really surprisingly good *close to the time of launch* – a few days out, they can look quite different.)

Avatar

Was that geek gurl there?

Leave a Comment

Comments are closed