Pelicanator

Mission system: WARHEAD

Challenge: NASA tasked teams with simulating human spaceflight telemetry and crew safety. Teams had to safely transport fragile humanoid figures through the extreme G-forces of launch, deployment, and landing. Additionally, the payload had to act as a localized communication hub, using an APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) to transmit vital flight parameters (such as altitude, descent rate, and GPS location) back to a ground station to verify the “crew’s” safety post-landing.

Design/Execution: WARHEAD’s (Wireless APRS Relay for High-altitude Environmental & Atmospheric Data) core capsule subsystem was the STEMCRaFT (STEMnaut Capsule Radio Frequency Transmitter), which served as a secure containment vessel for four STEMnaut figures and housed the avionics suite. The electronics architecture included two internal subsystems: FUSE (Flight Unit for Sensing & Evaluation) and SWITCH (Scheduled Wireless Information Transmission & Compilation Hub), along with TORCH (Transmission Operations Relay for Capsule Handling). The onboard sensors continuously sampled flight data during descent, including altitude and acceleration. Upon landing, the system automatically transmitted the recorded flight telemetry and STEMnaut survivability data to the team’s ground station via the APRS network. The team earned a 2nd-place overall finish at the 2024-2025 competition, placing 2nd in the payload challenge.