Wireless Sensor Payload Design for Sounding Rocket

A quick turnaround Sub-Orbital Student Experiment Module sounding rocket experiment has been designed and built to initiate the Old Dominion University wireless spacecraft bus project for the Mid Atlantic Institute for Space and Technology. The sounding rocket was launched on the 8 of June 2006 from NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This wireless sounding rocket experiment is the first step directed toward replacing wired data interfaces with their corresponding wireless counterparts for low-cost access to space. The sounding rocket experiment is designed to achieve two objectives: wireless sensor network data acquisition on board the payload and Radio Frequency (RF) environmental characterization in wireless personal area network frequency domain. The wireless sensor data collected on board provided us valuable information needed to simulate the RF environment that will exist in future space flights.