During the weekend there was a TV interview and some newspaper articles appeared in the media. These can be found in the Media appearances page. If there is anything you want to share with us, please let us know what you think.

The time has come when the precise, detailed and hopefully sufficiently comprehensive design work of the past months manifests in physical devices. The interfaces (mechanical, electronic, data, etc.) between the subunits can mainly be considered as ready. The development versions of the system units (power management, on-board computer and communication) are ready and operate. Naturally these are not the final flight versions, but they perform as we expect. In the mean time we began to prepare the test procedure, the test plan and the drafts of the documents. This either is not a trivial task; therefore we began to sort the tasks to be done still in time.

We have also reached the first important milestone. The majority of the mechanical design is considered as complete. This means that the structure, the covers, the size and place of all the electronic panels, the position of the sensors and their field of view are finalized and the productions starts soon.

The core team reviews the circuit diagrams once again to make sure that every signal line (either analog or digital) is properly ended. Surprisingly large amount of signals have to be digitized compared to size of the CubeSat. More than 20 have to be handled just from thermal sensor signals, while all the analog signals and values are around 100. It is certain that everything that can be measured and is worth to be monitored will be sent to the Erath in telemetry packages. Those who receive the transmission will get sufficiently enough information about the current state of the satellite.

Now we have ended up the CubeSat Conference. We have heard and seen a lot of presentations about nano- and micro-satellites, ground stations and useful payload experiments. You can find some more information at the ESA website.

We had successfully arrived to the 2nd European CubeSat Workshop and had an informal discussion with the other teams. You can find some pictures in the gallery.

As in the previous years, the Hungarian Contest of Applied Engineering Sciences, known to many as “Hungarians on the Mars”, will be organized also this year. We also applied with our team “VAC Robot”, hoping to reach similarly good results as last year. This year’s challenge is extraordinary since the self-made vehicles will have to be controlled and navigated in an 8×8 m pool filled with water, not on dry land. Naturally the objective is to autonomously solve the task this year too. The mission is described here.