The students of the Italian Air Force Academy finished today their GESAD (Management of Aerospace Systems for Defense) course with a real mission: after learning the basics of satellite technology and theoretical studies of space operations, they conducted a real-like space mission with a stratospheric balloon.
They built a experiment package and used Kitsat as a satellite analogue during the mission.
The balloon was launched on 31 May at 9:30 from Pozzuoli near Naples. It reached an altitude of 25 kilometres and the payload was recovered after the flight near Lacedonia, a municipality in the province of Avellino.
An important part of this kind of mission is also the preparations for the flight, supported by Kitsat statospheric flight kit: the flight path has to be calculated using simulations based on the weather conditions. Additionally, as the Italians beautifully demonstrated, flight has to be conducted in coordination activity with the Air Traffic Management – in this case both civil and military authorities.
Read an article by the Accademia Aeronautica (in Italian) here:
Accademia Aeronautica: concluso con successo l’esperimento scientifico progettato nel nuovo Laboratorio di Sistemi Spaziali