Teaming Tracking - Ensuring a Safe Return Home
TEAM TRACKING - PROGRESS REPORT 1
Task
Our task for this project was to develop a comprehensive tracking system to retrieve the payload attached to a weather balloon sent into space. The primary challenge in the early planning stages of this project were to find an affordable tracking device that could update its location, use GPS satellite, and withstand the extreme temperature variation in the cosmic environment, as well as the possible swampy or moist environment where it could likely land. This led us to purchase the Spot Trace tracking device. It has the ability to report any changes in its location every five minutes, which is optimal because we will be following the trajectory of the balloon as it takes flight. Further, the Spot device can withstand temperatures of -33 C to 60 C and it operates at an altitude in the range (-328 m to 6500 m) that the balloon is expected to ascend to. The tracker was also fairly affordable with a sticker price of $99, and $99 for Spot tracking services for one year. However, we also purchased a cellular GPS tracker and a tile alert system to help develop a more comprehensive system.
Current Challenges
The challenges that we have faced in developing our tracking system include overcoming the Spot’s “Camp Mode” where it stops reporting its location once it has not been moved for approximately five minutes, figuring out how to make the cell phone tracker work, and locating a handheld device that our team can use to track our location in reference to the payload during retrieval. Several members of our team have conducted tests on whether the Spot is able to report its location under brush and trees (to simulate the environment where it might land) and the device has been able to successfully provide updates of its location. However, our greatest obstacle with this device has been receiving updates of location, once the device has been stationary for roughly five minutes. The Spot does, however, send out its final location before it stops tracking. Our fear is that the Spot device may only track distance radially (along the ground) but not vertically, therefore resulting in only a few readings for us to use to track its location. More testing will resume to determine if this is a problem.
The cellular phone tracker was originally planned as a backup device for the Spot Trace. It was fairly cheap, lightweight, small and compact. The challenges of using this device were anticipated to be the fact that it would only work in the range of a cellular tower and it might not withstand the harsh cosmic environment. More specifically, if the payload landed in a rural area it might not have a tower to connect to and the drastic cold temperature in space could cause it to lose its ability to track location. Our group read the manuals, researched the device online and continued to tinker with it without any success.
Future Work
Moving forward, the Tracking Team will use the Spot Trace device, however as a backup (instead of the cellular tracker) implement the use of a radio tracker instead. The radio tracker would provide us with a way to track the payload consistently through its ascent and descent as well as the altitude data that would enhance our video of our payload’s trip to space. Our next efforts are to research radio-tracking devices, locate someone with a radio license to operate it, and to locate someone with a handheld tracker. We will continue to tinker with the cellular device, however our main focus is to obtain the radio-tracking device. Moreover our next step is to continue testing the tracking ability of the Spot (vertically) through tests on stairs or an elevator.
