Rules and Regulations

Balloons in India are governed by the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the rules and regulations are covered at their site.

Guidelines

Make sure to follow all regulations especially .
Safety first! Remember that the payload drops from a great height.
- Parachutes should be sized appropriately for the payload weight.
- Sharp edges are daengerous
Always have FTU (Flight termination units)
Have a proper recovery system

All our codes and instructions of using them are are avaliable at https://github.com/iiabaloongroup.

We have also developed a star sensor for use on minisatellites, cubesats and high altitude balloon pointing systems. It is a wide field camera with FOV of 10 degrees which captures images of the star field and matches them with a catalog stored on-board. After identifying the stars it outputs the RA and DEC of the sensor coordinate system. It uses centroiding algorithm to detect stars in the image, geometric voting algorithm to identify them from a star catalog and QUEST algorithm to calculate the quaternion. A software package was developed to simulate these algorithms and estimate their performance for various physical properties of the star sensor hardware. The software package is available at https://github.com/mayuresh159/starsense_algorithms.