PDR & Student Training Week
By DESTINY on February 16, 2019
From February 11th to 15th, the DESTINY team attended to the REXUS/BEXUS Student Training Week at the DLR MORABA center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. It was a very intense and interesting week, with more than twenty presentations. The addressed topics were very diverse: balloon flight dynamics, mechanical, thermal and software design, system engineering, implementation, project and risk management, tests and verification, outreach…
We had the pleasure to meet once again all the other REXUS/BEXUS teams. Thanks to all these people - from Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Greece or Switzerland - the atmosphere was very friendly. Some activities were planned to get to know each other, such as a small hike on the first evening.
Most of all, it was crucial for the teams to discuss with each other to determine whether an experiment could endanger another one, in order to know if we had better to switch some experiments. The DESTINY experiment will fly in the BEXUS 28 balloon, along with four other experiments.
A funny but necessary activity consisted in building a model of our experiment out of cardboard. The experiments were then arranged in a gondola to check if they all fit together.
The key moment of this week was the Preliminary Design Review (PDR). Each team presented the advancement of its project to a panel of experts from the ESA, DLR, SNSA, SSC, ZARM and Eurolaunch and then received a one-hour feedback. Our presentation was on Thursday: the experts were satisfied with the first version of our SED. We received a huge amount of advices and directions to ensure the progress of the DESTINY project.
Our next meeting is the Critical Design Review (CDR), which will take place in ESTEC, Noordwijk, from May 15th to 17th!