Launch campaign, Wednesday and Thursday

Yesterday continued with preparation for the hot bench test and launch. The experiment looks good and only the final touches were required. Planned was to replace the wires with brand new ones for the SCALE system and the final assembly of the E-box. The SCALES worked excellently after receiving new wires and the bad RF board that was bothering us was replaced with the functioning test board, or so we thought. The Scales were functioning perfectly for a few test but started stalling again one by one, also the system does still not receive any GPS fix. So no rest for us then before launch.

Thursday continued with working on the SCALES and bench testing the full flight sequence. I and Gustaf were functioning as the launch officers for the behalf of SQUID. A series of six full simulated launch sequences were carried out with all the REXUS 10 rocket system and experiments and I can say that my confidence of the system grew with every test as SQUID functioned flawlessly every time, even with some hiccups with the ground support equipment.

As me and Georg are staying at Kiruna, we must drive every day to and from Esrange, a rather exciting 45 minute trip with slippery roads close encounters with the local fauna. One could say that thousands of ears of evolution have not prepared reindeers hove to cope with the resent invention of modern motor transportation. At any moment, a pack of reindeers can decide to utilize the flat snow free strip of terrain called road by the humans to try escape the roaring Chevrolet beast we are driving.

//Mikko

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