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Technology
of the OMGL as presented to the IAC
2004 Congress
For a detailed explaination of the OMGL
technology, we publish here the slides presented at the International
Astronautics Congress 2004 in
Vancouver,
Canada, with additional comments.
You can
also read our paper, published
in the IAC congress CD, and use a
java simulator to simulate the flight of the OMGL on your computer with
different parameters.
Slide
1: The
Opensource
MicroGravity Laboratory is an opensource project by Nanogravity
Labs,
a small worldwide
fundamental physics reseach group of university students, young
scientists and engeneers.
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Slide
2: The
current
microgravity
technologies have the problems of being too costly for a large number
of potential scientific users or having a too short microgravity
duration. We propose a low-cost resuable alternative to sounding
rockets and longer microgravity time.
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Slide 3:
The opensource development has many
advantages, the
most important one for us is security due to the required public
accessibility of design modification.
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Slide
4: The
most important
component is the experiment container, a sealed hollow spherical
container insulated from vibrations, noise, heat and electric fields.
It provides energy to experiments thanks to the internal bettery array.
It also contains an internal 3d
accelerometer
made of nanotube balances arrays to monitor
and
record the quality of the experiment during all the experiment.
The
avionics is pretty simple: its main
functions are
the regulation of the air drag compensation and the communication of
the laboratory position to the rescue ship. For these functions it uses
a sensitive accelerometer, indipendent from that of the experiment
container, a computer, a satellite positioning system, a satellite
phone and the internal optical LAN connecting the avionics to the other
components.
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Slide
5: The
airframe is
designed using the Sears-Haack body as a model. Its streamlined
designed is necessary to reduce turbolence and vibrations, while the Sears-Haack
body shape is necessary to get the minimum wave drag
during transonic and supersonic flight. The shape of the nozzle will be
studied and tested to create a minimum impact on the OMGL's
aerodynamics. The final design will require extensive testing in
subsonic and supersonic wind galleries.
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