Recently we had a visit from ESA DG Jan Wörner. He gave a talk about space 4.0 and visited a selection of student teams, including PR^3! (Photo: Bart van Overbeeke, https://www.bvof.nl/)

Recently we had a visit from ESA DG Jan Wörner. He gave a talk about space 4.0 and visited a selection of student teams, including PR^3! (Photo: Bart van Overbeeke, https://www.bvof.nl/)
Payload for Radiation measurement and Radio-interferometry in Rockets
The PR³ team was born in October 2017, with the intention of providing room for bachelor and master students interested in space research.
PR³ stands for open collaboration between universities, and students to gather knowledge in the latest space research. Specially, in the areas of interferometry, and radiation measurement.
PR³ is taking part of the REXUS/BEXUS 2017-2019 launch program.
The team is the result of the close collaboration between Radboud RadioLab in Nijmegen, and the Electronic Systems group at TU/e. The PR3 Team is formed by a panel of experts, and students from both Radboud RadioLab, and TU/e.
The base of the PR³ team is located in Eindhoven, at the TU/e.
In the summer of 2017 a group of students at the Eindhoven University of Technology decided to put a theory developed by the Radboud University into practice. At the time, Radboud Radio Lab (RRL) was working on a satellite payload destined to be part of the Chang’e 4 mission. Its objective is to perform radio-interferometry from the far side of the moon (L2) and gather data for research into the history of the universe.
RRL realized however, that a similar technique can also be used to track objects that emit a radio signal, e.g. beacons. Simulations show that for static objects sub-centimeter accuracy can be achieved. The 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-of-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.