Smart Sensors Group

On November 11, 2024 at 8:38 a.m., DLR's MAPHEUS 15 sounding rocket took off from Kiruna, Sweden, for a flight of over 300 km. Full press release of the TUHH can be found here. On board were 6 SpacePatches sensor systems from the Smart Sensors Group, which were developed as part of the ongoing AuRelia and SArES projects. Christopher Büchse played a key role in the project under the name RocketPatch. Many thanks to Dr. Jens Hauslage for enabling this opportunity and kudos to the entire DLR MAPHEUS team.

Missions to the moon and Mars are increasingly attracting the interest of manned space travel. What does this mean for researchers and space travelers? This question was the focus of the latest “Future Lecture” at Hamburg University of Technology. A particular highlight of the event was that TU Hamburg was able to welcome Dr. Markus Braun from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as a guest speaker.

In the upcoming winter semester WS24, we will again offer interesting courses. The lecture Energieeffizienz in eingebetteten Systemen and two Seminare on the topics of intra-satellite communication using LiFi, and sensors under space conditions. Another interesting course will be Research Based Learning

Every year, the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure e.V. (VDI) and its local district association honor outstanding bachelor's, diploma and master's theses by young engineers in the Hamburg area. Julian Neundorf was awarded 2nd prize for his Master's thesis on “Investigation of the effect of different measurement voltage parameters in the bioimpedance measurement of potatoes”. Congratulations Julian!

Even though the experiments around BEAT were some time ago, things got exciting again last Friday. We received the hardware back from the ISS and subjected it to an initial inspection at DLR Bremen. Thank you again for the great collaboration with your colleagues at DLR Bremen. We are looking forward to the follow-up projects (BEAT and beyond!)

As part of our EduSat teaching project, we recently launched the first series of teaching courses Grundlagen Raumfahrtelektronik. The Hamburger Abendblatt has published an article on this. The long-term goal is to develop and launch a real CubeSat in combination with courses and working groups together with students. The scientific mission will also be developed in an interdisciplinary manner on the TUHH campus.

Yannick Loeck joined the Smart Sensors group the 1st of April (no joke). He will strengthen our research team and will work on the recently started project EduSat. Welcome, Yannick!

The use of smaller, more efficient and cost-effective FPGAs is also becoming increasingly important in the space segment. We therefore feel honored that our proposed payload RISA (Reliability Investigation of Low Power FPGAs for Space Applications) from TUHH's Smart Sensors Group has been selected by Institute of Space Systems at DLR in Bremen to fly on the 6U CubeSat PLUTO. We believe that RISA will make important scientific contributions to the reliable use of low power (LP) FPGAs in space missions over the duration of the DLR PLUTO mission.

Christopher Büchse joined the Smart Sensors group as Doctoral Researcher with the 16th of January. He will strengthen our research team and will work on the recently started DLR research project SArES. Welcome, Christopher!

Thibault Paris (Novespace), Ulf Kulau and Urs-Vito Albrecht (University Bielefeld) at Novespace, Bordeaux, at the preparatory workshop for participation in the DLR parabolic flight campaign. The parabolic flight campaign is part of our currently running AuRelia project.

SArES is making an important contribution to future SCG sensor systems for monitoring the health of astronauts. In particular, SArES research will focus on local data backup and a hardware, firmware and software system tailored to the Artemis mission as a flight-capable system. The SArES project line is funded and administered by German Space Agency at DLR, supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (FKZ 50WB2421A)