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Show HN: My high school team's space probe

Show HN: My high school team's space probe

3 comments

·March 16, 2025

Me and a few friends made this design document as part of our entry to the UK CanSat competition where a high school team is required to build a probe to be launched. The probe must serve some purpose, and ours was to map the temperature and pressure of the air at different altitudes.

We had the opportunity to launch it a week ago and you can find the video of our launch here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16bsLzxjP7OWRqVvCB62cLv7QYLR...

During the launch we reached 400m above sea level, and the can pulled 70gs successfully. The parachute and can stayed intact. Unfortunately, on the day, we were unable to successfully implement GPS.

The raw results are here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oK1vukjcNcsaXMAPeFlzZ66aHlR... And a slightly cleaned up version is here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xYhkp3sWoJF0bCkkvFs1AygSdLU...

I used my data presentation software to present our results here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-r7lT0J4MDLiYfuaasDXJsr5rCA... The software (in the form of a python script to be executed in blender) can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LHP7OwgI_O8t6-NBI0ZPn9JUt2G... It's not pretty, but it works.

The differences in temperature and pressure results were exaggerated in the so that the gradient could be clearly seen.

Unfortunately, we did not get into the final (judged on this document) but it was an awesome experience nevertheless. The judges used this form to mark us: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eZnum5zuJvkLzY7RLtm9A-NNzxw... We would love to get any feedback from more experienced people, as we intend to do similar projects in the future and at least two of us want to be professional engineers. I'm happy to reply to any comments.

sailorganymede

From the UK too. Seeing those docs gave me a total whiplash! I remember the amount of paperwork we had to do for these kind of projects. Funny how nothing has changed.

Scarjit

Congratulations on your launch! Super interesting to see all of the technical documentation behind it.

JohnOfOsgiliath

Thanks so much for the kind words. I really enjoyed writing the documentation.