Pi in spaaaaace... for a bit longer than planned
Pi in spaaaaace... for a bit longer than planned
Ariane 6 might have had some APU problems, but the well-Armed hardware on YPSat worked well
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Raspberry Pi camera is orbiting the Earth, attached to ESA's YPSat, a week after both were supposed to have burned up upon re-entering the atmosphere with the upper stage of the Ariane 6.
Built to last just three hours, the payload was meant to have re-entered with the upper stage on Tuesday last week – July 9 – and burned up in the atmosphere.
However, a problem with an Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU) coupled with the failure of the Vinci engine on the stage to start has meant that YPSat has been able to spend a bit longer in orbit than its designers had planned, even if its batteries are likely long dead by now.
YPSat aimed to acquire imagery of the fairing and payload separations, as well as snapping pictures from the top of the upper stage before transmitting the recorded data back to Earth ahead of the expiry of its power source and reentry into the Earth's atmosphere.
While YPSat appears to have worked perfectly, from detecting lift-off, through to capturing the moment of fairing separation and taking images of Earth from orbit, the reentry bit did not go so well.
YPSat, with its Raspberry Pi image hardware, remains in space until the orbit of the upper stage of the Ariane 6 finally decays and the payload is destroyed.
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