My name is Raul Ramirez, I am a Computer Science and Computational Mathematics student at Utah State University! Currently, I am working as an Engineering Assistant at the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. I also was the Get Away Special Team Coordinator for two years at Utah State.
I owe everything that I know to the Get Away Special Team. I started in the club as a Software Team lead and it was my responsibility to build a high altitude balloon computer system. The code which can be found here on GitHub. The code was written and designed for an Arduino Mega. Using various sensors such as temperature, light, UV, pressure, radios, and gyroscopes. We named the project ERRNO, Elevated Real-time Research Near-Earth Observer. ERRNO was the first project that I became the Team Leader also known as the coordinator. I became the systems engineer and instructed my team on how to build ERRNO, what mission parameters were, and the expectation for each mission. ERRNO has successfully flown into space reaching heights of 120,000 feet! ERRNO is open source and free to use by anyone who has aspirations to fly high altitude balloons.
I have also become the systems engineer for a 1U Cube Satellite known as GASPACS, Get Away Special Passive Attitude Control System. GASPACS was a 1U Cube Sat proposed by James Gardiner, a former coordinator of the Get Away Special Team, it was designed to deploy a meter long aeroboom in space with a UV curable resin to stabilize the Cube Sat in Low Earth Orbit. Originally, this Cube Sat was designed to fly with components provided by Gomspace. However, it was my decision to have the Cube Sat be available for open source. Currently, the team are designing a structure to house our Cube Sat, we are deciding on batteries and solar panels, and we are using a Raspberry Pi Zero as our flight computer with Adafruit Sensors to support our mission. Lastly, I am proud to say that GASPACS will be flying open source software.
Cubium was created by Jack Miranda. They had a vision to make software that is open source and available for the world to use. Cubium is built from the ground up using C++ and C systems calls for sockets. Cubium will experience it's first flight on a high altitude balloon this year before we send it for it's real mission in space! The source code for Cubium can be found here on GitHub. Which has much more information available for all.
For more information on the Get Away Special Team, please visit the Get Away Special Team's website for all the latest news and events!
Thank you for taking the time to read my short bio! I can be reached at rlramirez12@gmail.com.