Mission 158 is a series of flights related to a collaborative effort to launch food from the Iowa State Fair into near space. This mission also resulted in a redesign of both the spacecraft enclosure and the electronics used and pushed the development of several key engineering items that will be used in future flights. The flights took place from June 2021 to August 2021.
HABET Flighth LX-158-A was the first flight in testing both the new on board computer and a newer version of BERT. While the flight was successful in flying and recovering, a number of issues came up. As a first flight with experimental hardware however, this was expected
HABET Flight LX-158-B was another test in testing the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with the Rocket M5 along with the HAR and BERT systems. This flight used a fully 3D printed spacecraft with foam added for insulation. The flight, unfortunatly, was not very successful. While the spacecraft and data was recovered, both LoRa and WiFi transmissions were quickly lost. Recovery was only made possible as someone found the spacecraft on their property. The balloon also did not shred properly.
HABET Flight LX-158-C was another test in testing the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with the Rocket M5 along with the HAR and BERT systems. This flight was successful in that LoRa worked for the entire flight and BERT also worked. A fix to how the GPS modules on both HAR and BERT worked was successful in fixing many of the issues we had on previous flights.
HABET Flight L-158-D was the first flight to remove experimental status and was also the final flight under Mission 158. This was the actual Iowa State Fair flight that took place on August 15th. The flight was successful in that video of the foods were both transmitted and recorded and the flight was carried out with no issues.