The CanSat Competition is an international design/build/fly engineering competition held yearly in Stephenville, Texas and provides students with an opportunity to design an aerospace system. It is designed to reflect a small-scale aerospace program and includes the project design life cycle from preliminary design review to post mission review. Teams of up to 10 undergraduate students build CanSats, which must complete a mission that changes every year. In this year’s mission, the CanSat will be launched to 700 meters using a high-powered model rocket, and must perform a controlled descent while transmitting data from its onboard sensors to a ground station computer. The CanSat consists of a container that must protect the science payload from damage during the launch and deployment. Initially, both descend under a parachute. At 400 meters, the payload is released and continues its descent using an autogyro propeller. The CanSat must be equipped with sensors for environmental conditions (temperature, pressure, GPS position, altitude) and system performance (orientation, battery voltage, auto-gyro spin rate). It must be capable of transmitting this data in real-time to a ground station computer. The scope of our project is designing and building the CanSat and ground station. The launch system (a high-power model rocket) is provided by the competition organizers to standardize launches.

Our team represents UC Irvine in this international competition. Members of CanSat UCI will follow the engineering design process from concept generation through integration and test, actual operation of the system, and the concluding post-mission summary and debrief. This year’s objective is to build a probe (the CanSat) that transmits environmental data to a ground station and performs a controlled descent using a parachute and auto-gyro propeller. The mission and its requirements reflect aspects of real world missions, including telemetry requirements, communications, and autonomous operations. Our project deliverables are the Preliminary Design Review and Critical Design Review presentations, the CanSat and ground station hardware, and the post-mission review. We follow a yearly design cycle, adhering to deadlines and requirements imposed by the competition. This ensures all teammates gain experience with the full engineering design process.

Faculty Advisor:  Professor Rangel

Email:  cansatuci@gmail.com

Website:  https://sites.google.com/a/uci.edu/cansat/