BEXUS 16/17 balloon launch campaign about to start

This year’s Bexus campaign is starting on Friday 4 of October, with the students travelling to SSC Esrange Space Center in Northern Sweden. Tomorrow morning the preparation of the stratospheric balloons experiments will begin. The first launch opportunity will be on Tuesday and the second one on Wednesday.

BEXUS 16 will accommodate three university student experiments: iSEDE from the United Kingdom, testing a prototype of an all-inflatable satellite with disaggregated electronics, Daemon from Hungary, testing the damaging effect of UV light for DNA in different altitudes and FLASH from Germany, testing an automated fluid laboratory for living human cells samples.

BEXUS 17 payload will be composed of two university student experiments: TORMES from Spain, testing a novel GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) reflectometer, and ARCADE-R2 from Italy, testing an automatic small scale docking system.

The REXUS/BEXUS programme is realized under a bilateral Agency Agreement between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB). Through the collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), the Swedish share has been made available to students from all ESA Member or Cooperating States. EuroLaunch, the cooperation between the Esrange Space Center of SSC and the Mobile Rocket Base (MORABA) of DLR, is responsible for the campaign management and operations of the launch vehicles. Experts from DLR, SSC, ZARM, and ESA provide technical and logistic support to the student teams throughout the project.

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