2007 Qualifying Video

Written by Tom Nugent on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

Below is the interesting part of the qualifying video we submitted to Spaceward back at the beginning of October. (The entire video is about 5 minutes long, but watching us mount and dismount the vehicle is less interesting.) Note that the PV array was only a portion of our final array, and similarly we were only using some of our lasers. There are silver lines every one meter on the ribbon, and you can barely see them as they go along. We start by “locking” the test rig rollers so that the ribbon does not move (this is done by grabbing onto one of the rollers with a gloved hand). The vehicle climbs to the top of the treadmill, where we then start letting the rollers turn. The vehicle continues to “climb” for about 20 seconds, and then we let it come back down. Total ribbon distance travelled is between 50 and 60 feet at roughly 1 m/s.

It’s a shame that last-minute wiring changes on the vehicle motor controller at the competition itself prevented us from showing what the full system was capable of. With luck, we will be able to make some alternate kind of demonstration to show in the not-too-distant future.