For the obvious reasons, I invariably get too busy to blog exactly when things get interesting...
Aris S-58 preparing to lift
The tether system test flight, scheduled for June 15th, (two weeks away!) is the first of two major bridges we have to cross to get to the competition. The test is basically a dry run of the games. It includes everything we plan to do – except the lasers.
The goals of the test are:
- Validate the behavior of the hardware components of the system – does everything perform “as advertised”?
- Validate the procedures we wrote for executing all the tasks – do they make sense? are they feasible? do they achieve what we intended them to do?
- Confirm that all the communication loops work
- Validate the pilot’s ability to perform station-keeping while at high altitude
- Validate the dynamic behavior of the cable
- Confirm that we can capture the video angles we need, in sufficient quality, both for safety and for the live-cast
- Perform battery-powered climbs to check out telephoto performance and tracking ability
- Rehearse everything, so we have to improvise nothing.
The first step of the test (Monday) included doing all of the above, but without a helicopter – we’ll use an airplane tug to emulate the helicopter on the ground, and go through the motions – horizontally instead of vertically.
The second step (Tuesday) is the actual test flight. The flight will follows the “envelope expansion” paradigm in that we’ll take it one step at a time rather than try the full all deployment at once. For example, we’ll first reel out only 50 m of tether, and then reel it back in – it would be a hard day if we reeled out 1000 m and then found out we have a problem with our reel-in procedure.
During this day, we’ll also start exercising the various cameras, so we are familiar with all of the shots we have planned for the games. The eventual live feed will be available on the screen available through the “LIVE COVERAGE” button at the top of the page. Since we’ll be testing EVERYTHING, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to see some of the activities on that console.
The third day is a contingency day, and also available for teams to try battery-powered climbs, to test the behavior and endurance of their climbers, and to test their tracking systems.
Once we complete these tests, we know that the infrastructure side of the games is ready to support the teams.
The next step after this – laser testing.