Tubular - BEXUS Project

14/04/2019

Hey people! We have been invited by ESA - European Space Agency to present our experiment at the 24th ESA Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon Programmes and related Research. To prepare for it, Erik has been working on a brand new poster for the presentation on TUBULAR and the exquisite data we got from our flight.

Read more about it on Erik's blog post!
https://rexusbexus.github.io/tubular/ -goal-symposium

25/01/2019

Hej people! It's been a while but we're back with some results. Rejoice:
https://rexusbexus.github.io/tubular/ -results-are-in

In general, the concentrations of CO2, CH4, and CO decrease as the altitude increases. The maximum value of CO2 is 405 ppm, for CH4 is approximately 2 ppm, and for CO it is close to 90 ppb. You'll notice a red asterisk on the x-axis of each plot, it's a reference point for concentrations at 1000 hPa (surface) measured at 20 km from the landing site.

A strong decrease of CO2 can be observed in the first layers above 6 km. CO2 reaches its highest value of 405 ppm just above the tropopause (162.5 hPa). In the stratosphere, CO2 values are lower since the exchange rate between upper troposphere and lower stratosphere takes several years. The Mixing ratios of CH4 have a small variability in the troposphere. The strong decrease of CH4 in the stratosphere is easy to spot with a value of 1.9 ppm near the tropopause at 162.5 hPa to that of 1.2 ppm at 20 hPa.

CO2 variability is higher near the ground, whereas CH4 variability is higher in the mid-to-upper troposphere and in the stratosphere. This is in agreement with the idea that CO2 may have negative and positive anomalies at the surface (associated mainly with vegetation uptake and anthropogenic emissions), whereas CH4 has mostly positive anomalies coming from the surface and negative anomalies coming from the stratosphere.

Hungry for more? I bet! You can read about the results in detail in the SED v5.0 under Section 7.3.6 - Scientic Results (pp. 163-165). Very exciting!

12/12/2018

One of two new BEXUS teams starting at LTU. We wish them all the success! 🥳

IRISC (InfraRed Imaging of Astronomical targets with a Stabilized Camera) is an experiment which will be launched on a BEXUS balloon.

25/10/2018

One week after the launch Team TUBULAR is taking a little bit of a respite to catch up on some of our other tasks, not least including sleep! But in the mean time if you're hungry for more BEXUS news you can check out this article from ESA about the BEXUS launch campaign.

Last week 50 students from around Europe descended onto the Esrange Space Centre in Arctic Sweden to launch the culmination of a year’s hard work to the edge of space!

18/10/2018

Tonight our AAC was delivered back to us and we were allowed special early access to see if we had managed to sample anything. Unfortunately as we expected all bags were empty so it was not possible to take any samples. However the box is in good shape so once we complete our failure analysis if we can find another balloon willing to take us we may be able to fly it again.

What we like to take from this is that now both our science and technical teams have some post flight work to do 😅 while having a failure like this really does suck, we can also see it as a great opportunity to learn and arguably this is still not a bad outcome.

Our objectives were twofold: a proof of concept that the bag system worked and data collection to aid research. We have in fact achieved both of these objectives. We know that this system with this precise setup and procedure does not work, though we're pretty confident it will work with just a few minor changes, and we have data to contribute from the aircore.

Moving forward the team will first carry out failure analysis from tomorrow to find out what went wrong with the pump. We have also saved our stratospheric air samples with FMI and they will send the samples for further testing of even more isotopes. We will also discuss as a team the potential future of this project so watch this space.

18/10/2018

The recovery team drove around 860 km to recover our AirCore. They had to hike 5 km through the forest in order to get to it it so 10 km in total. It took around 13 hours to recover it by car and by foot. A big thank you to the recovery team lead by Stefan Krämer from the SSC - Swedish Space Corporation.

Since we closed the valve at 6.5 km altitude, we expected the pressure inside the coil to be 440 mBar, but when we got it back we found it was at sea level pressure. This could have meant one of two things - 1) the valve never opened and the AirCore was still full of fill gas 2) there was a leak through the valve.

After plugging it in, there was a moment where it was fill gas and then suddenly the CO concentration dropped dramatically indicating that we had stratospheric air! What a relief, we have something! The tropospheric samples are questionable but the stratospheric samples are very good. The stratospheric air samples have been stored in 15 pieces of tubing FMI brought with them so that they may later run further analysis on them.

What about our other sampling system, the one with the bags? Alas, it suffered from a component failure with the air pump. We mitigated by switching to manual mode and sending valve commands for passive sampling. We haven't recovered this part of the experiment yet. I must say, it was quite amazing how the team handled the malfunction as it unfolded and came up with a new plan. Telecommanding is super cool. Stay tuned to find out if it actually worked!

https://rexusbexus.github.io/tubular/ -recovered

18/10/2018

One of our babies is home 😍 The landing was really nice on some soft ground so aside from a few scratches on one side and a few souvenirs from the forest our CAC looks almost the same as when we waved it goodbye. But the real question is, is there anything inside other than the fill gas...

After running it in the piccarro analyser for a few minutes we finally see stratospheric air samples 🎉🎉 luckily we have Kiki from science well rested again now to watch the data come in as for the rest of us it's time for some much needed sleep!

https://rexusbexus.github.io/tubular/ -recovered

17/10/2018

We got word that our CAC box containing our Aircore should arrive back at Esrange around 1am tonight. Hopefully we can get some good data from the stratosphere back from it 😊 we'll keep you posted.

17/10/2018

Updates: It looks like a partial success. To be confirmed!

Sampling with the AirCore (CAC) happened nominally and this is awesome.

Sampling with the bags (AAC) suffered component failure with the air pump. We mitigated by switching to manual mode and sending valve commands for passive sampling. Time will tell if this actually worked. Eager to find out.

Quick revovery with helicopter has been cancelled due to the weather. This is not ideal but it's not bad either. We will attempt a car pickup.

17/10/2018

TUBULAR is sad to report that we unfortunately have a suspected failure on our pump. We are currently trying to try every trick we can think of to bring it back to life but as of now we think we are most likely going to lose our AAC system. We will try and see if we can make any passive pressure samples on the descent to try and get something.

Luckily we still have our CAC system so we will hopefully still get some data back.

17/10/2018

BEXUS 26 currently showing up on flight radar :D

17/10/2018

We're flying 😍😍
https://rexusbexus.github.io/tubular/