Hi everyone,
We are student team PR4space. This is a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology and Radboud University Nijmegen. Our main research topics are radio interferometry based location tracking and cosmic ray research. The team was founded under the name PR3 (Payload for Radio interferometry and Radiation measurements on Rockets) in 2017 as part of the REXUS/BEXUS program. With this program our first payload was launched in 2019 on the REXUS25 rocket. After launching with T-minus engineering in 2022, the team launched the PR4 (Payload for Radio interferometry and Radiation measurements on Rockets Revisited) experiment in 2024 on REXUS31 and participated in the AMADEE-24 analog mars mission with ALIX (Astronaut Location Interferometry eXperiment).
We are proud to announce the team has recently been selected to fly on BEXUS37 with another cosmic ray experiment.
We learn a lot from all our missions and one of the big improvements in the BEXUS37 cosmic ray detector vs our REXUS31 cosmic ray detector is in the electronics. As a basis for the cosmic ray detector we use a stack of slabs of scintillator material. This scintillator material lights up when hit by a cosmic ray, and we can measure that light with an MPPC (multi pixel photon counter). Using the number of slabs hit, we can tell something about the trajectory of the cosmic ray.
Our old stinky version had 1 single big motherboard and had 1 MPPC per slab. The 1 MPPC per slab resulted in lots of noise and difficulty distinguishing real measurements from false positives. The new super cool design will have 2 MPPC’s per slab and a pcb that can do coincidence to check if both MPPC’s measured something to reduce the noise. It will also have a circuit without coincidence for individual calibration purposes. The new system will be modular, and hopefully we can start testing soon.
Usually in the Netherlands technical universities have cool student teams doing cool experiments, but theoretical universities do not. Founding not only a joint student team between two universities, but also one being a theoretical university has posed its challenges. For the PR4 experiment we got in a situation where we had no electrical engineer available but of course needed pcb’s designed for our experiments. Some brave physics and astronomy students sacrificed their summer to learn how to design pcb’s. AISLER sponsorship allowed us to not only order the pcb’s we needed, but to give these students the opportunity to make mistakes, learn, and produce a new iteration of the pcb.
One of our transmitter pcb’s for the radio interferometry experiment
The cherry on top of all this is the option to print not only logos but anything on the pcb’s. This provided us with the option to honour the creators by printing their faces on the pcb’s to remember for as long as they are used.
Thanks AISLER
