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HASP Overview and Summary

The High Altitude Student Platform (HASP) project has been very successful in providing access to near-space for science / engineering payloads in the 3 to 20 kilogram range developed by undergraduate and graduate students from across the country. Since its first flight in 2006, HASP has flown about 18 student payloads from 12 institutions, several test packages for the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF), and has accepted 13 payloads for its next flight in 2008. A HASP flight exceeds an altitude of 120,000 feet and duration of 16 to 18 hours. The payloads developed by the students have investigated a variety of topics including remote sensing, cosmic rays, high altitude dust collection, and testing satellite prototype systems.

The HASP system itself has proven to be very reliable providing power, telemetry and commanding to all the student payloads throughout the flights. In addition, the innovative HASP interface and control electronics has been modularized and mounted on a single lightweight structural plate. This allows the entire electronics package to be easily slid out of the HASP structure providing desktop checkout / maintenance / repair of the full electronics package and easy "plug and play" change out with a backup electronics plate in case of encountering a problem on the flight line. A consequence of such innovations is that HASP is shipped to the flight line almost fully ready and requires only a few days of preparation.

The initial three year flight program phase from 2006 through 2008 is focused on developing HASP, flight testing the platform and proving that HASP provides a valuable service for training a new generation of aerospace scientists and engineers. To bring HASP quickly to flight status (about 15 months from the start of project funding to first flight) we chose to use a mini-SIP control system which added ~600 pounds to the ~400 pound HASP. This increased the total suspended weight, including about 540 pounds of ballast, to 2000 pounds, requiring the use of a 11 million feet3 balloon for flight. While we feel that this decision was correct at the time, we believe that the HASP weight can now be significantly reduced allowing either a smaller balloon to be used and/or improving the student payload to infrastructure mass ratio.