- Massive growth in home automation over next four years
- Gerard Lighting get SIDE distributorship
- Oracle opens Sydney digital hub – says 200 jobs will be created
- VR app sends users to exotic locales to meditate
NASA used an Arduino and a few XBee boards to test its de-orbiting SOAREX-8 Exo-Brake technology.
The SOAREX-8 Exo-Brake Flight Test was launched in July on board the Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket. The Exo-Brake technology is a passive braking device that aims to allow rapid returns of small samples from an orbital platform.
It works by deploying a drogue parachute on board the rapidly-moving satellite. The parachute generates drag from the exosphere, the thin air that comprises the uppermost region of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The NASA researchers equipped the test nanosatellite with a modem, allowing the team to send commands and receive data to and from the satellite. They also integrated XBee ZigBee modules, an Arduino Mega, and an Iridium module to collect critical data on the test flight, using wireless sensor technology.
The XBees collected the sensor data including temperature, aerodynamic pressure and three-axis acceleration parameters, while the Arduino managed communications between the local XBee wireless network and the long-range Iridium satellite uplink.
The wireless sensor modules allowed the engineers to instrument the deployable parachute effectively, without having to run wires.