CANSAT Competition

Cansat is an acronym for satellite in a can. The main goal of the competition is to expose students to various challenges in aerospace engineering and flying vehicles. The competition is held annually in Texas, in which teams from universities around the globe gather to compete for the best CANSAT.

Cansat is an ongoing project. The work that I was involved are what I’m currently working on.

I am involved in designing mechanical components and software in CANSAT. Currently, our software team just started the process of designing our software. Meanwhile the mechanical team has been hard at work to design our own active control surface for our CANSAT. The challenge in this year CANSAT competition is come up with a mechanism to release the heat shield and control the descent rate.

Proposed solution

Active Control Surface
Currently, the active control surface is planned to be controlled by servos with interlocking mechanism to allow uniform expanding and contracting of the control surface.
Heat shield release mechanism
The heat shield is planned to be released by a servo. The details of the mechanism is yet to be proposed, but the whole team should soon work on this.

Our goals

Last year, our team won 4th place. This year, with more members in the team and more resources available, we are shooting for the first place. Besides the competition, our Cansat team also prioritize fun as a winning factor in the competition :)