Payload for
Radiation and
Radio-Interferometry on
Rockets
Revisited

PR4 is a student project in which we are designing an experimental payload for rockets. The mission of the PR4 project is to demonstrate the feasibility of high-accuracy location reconstruction through radio interferometry techniques and to characterize the arrival direction distribution of cosmic rays at altitudes between 20 and 80 km.

Radio Interferometry

The radio-interferometry experiment consists of three transmitters on a sounding rocket payload, which transmit on different frequencies. These signals are received by up to 6 receiver stations. The main server receives phase and timing information about these signals from each receiver, from which it can compute the location of the rocket using interferometry. It could even be used for determining the orientation of the rocket. The location reconstruction results can be followed live, during flight of the REXUS rocket.

Radiation

In the Radiation experiment, PR4 designed a CubeSat cosmic-ray detector that can ‘scan’ over the Earth in orbit in order to correlate the measured flux to cloud coverage. This might provide additional information to the ground-based neutron monitoring stations and the local coverage of single expensive cosmic-ray satellites. o design CubeSat cosmic-ray detectors that can ‘scan’ over the Earth in orbit in order to correlate the measured flux to cloud coverage. This might provide additional information to the ground-based neutron monitoring stations and the local coverage of single expensive cosmic-ray satellites.

On the 11th of March 2019  our team named as PR3, without the revisited term, designed a payload for the German-Swedish student programme REXUS/BEXUS. PR3 launched the payload as a part of the rocket REXUS 25The primary objective of PR3 is to adapt, and test, radio-interferometry to track (fast) moving objects, such as REXUS with a very high accuracy. As the Rexus payload only required three transmitter modules to be on board the experiment was extended to also perform radiation measurement with commercial-off-the-shelf camera sensors. Combined with high-accuracy position and orientation tracking provided by the radio-interferometry experiment an accurate measurement of radiation versus altitude and orientation can be made.

Join PR4

If you are interested in joining PR4 you have to be a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. student at Radboud University or Eindhoven University. Please send us an email informing us of your background.