Recent activities in MIST winter 2025

“Office Day”

MIST students have started running whole-day meetings to coordinate the various “work threads” of the project – reminiscent of the concept of “concurrent engineering”. These meetings started in the fall of 2024 and have continued during the spring semester. So far, two such meetings have been held: 1 February and 1 March. The big meeting room at Teknikringen 31 is available from 0900 to 1800 for group work. Here are a few pictures from these meetings.

1 February

1 March

Butane filling equipment for NanoProp collected on 5 February

The NanoProp propulsion system, developed by Gomspace that we hope to fly on MIST needs a system to fill its tank with butane – the “cold-gas” propellant. Gomspace staff support MIST with technical advice even though the company does not presently plan to build more NanoProp units. Therefore, the company has donated to KTH the equipment they developed to fill the system with butane. On 5 February we picked up the equipment in Uppsala. The fill system is stowed in a heated outdoor container at KTH and the butane bottles in a safety container for gases in the back yard of the building where the MIST work is carried out.

The butane bottles are stowed in the plywood boxes in the picture below. The fill equipment has lots of dials and controls.

Safe storage in the outdoor steel container.

Ground Station antenna soon back in operation – hopefully

At the end of September 2024 MIST was informed that the tar-paper on the roof of Teknikringen 31 would be replaced during the fall of 2024 and that we had to temporarily remove our control cables for the antenna. This completely made the antenna non-operational. Due to various factors the roofing has been greatly delayed and just recently (as of early March 2025) completed. In addition to this interruption of service the wooden work platform that we have used so far to maintain the antenna needs to be replaced by a system that does not pose a threat to the integrity of the roofing material.

The picture beow shows what the roof near the antenna looks like after the roofing work was completed.

A concept for a movable work platform has been worked on, see below (please forgive the Swedish captions):

The left-over roofing material was removed form the building by a huge crane on 26 February: