College of Engineering Unit:
The AERO.09 capstone project’s purpose is to create an automatic antenna tracking system, specifically designed for the High Altitude Rocket Team (HART) at Oregon State University. This project entails creating a physical tracking system that will take in real-time trajectory data from the HART rocket. It will effectively track the rocket’s GPS location at all times of the launch. HART has struggled with tracking its rocket, especially when headed back to Earth’s surface. Recovery of the rocket is one of the most important parts of a launch. The rocket team has expressed interest in an updated tracking system that can assist with their recovery issues. Any AIAA team at Oregon State will gain access to this device after this year. This project will serve as a resource for any rocketry team using the TeleMega flight computer system.
This team is composed of five MIME undergraduates, as well as one computer science undergraduate. The automatic antenna tracker is a new capstone project, started at the beginning of this team’s capstone term (Winter 2024). The team has worked with both HART and ESRA to test the product as well as consult for operational knowledge and expectations. The automatic antenna tracking team would like to acknowledge and thank the teams and individuals who have invested in this project, specifically HART, AIAA as a whole, and Dr. John Greeven. We hope there will be further iterations of this project to further improve upon our work.
