Interactive · PEARL-HEAT mission

Mission simulator

Fly PearlSat from power-on to landing. The logic is the same as our flight software: when it arms, how it decides it has been released, how often each camera shoots and what goes down the radio. The world around it is made up for the demo: anything marked SIM (heights, speeds, wind, surface temperatures) is illustrative, not a measurement. Thresholds are our current provisional settings and will be tuned in drop tests.

Side view · Bahrain Bay

Speed T+0.0 s

Flight computer

IDLE

ARMED

DESCENT

LANDED

Arming:

Free fall

Pressure drop

Tumble

Release vote:

Mission time

Altitude

Vertical speed

Tilt

Spin rate

Thermal pixel size

Colour frames

Thermal frames

Test frames

Radio packets

Below

Drift

Colour camera · looking down

2 frames/s, saved to SD

Thermal camera · 32 × 24

4 frames/s, saved to SD

Ground station · live image

16 × 12 by radio

Radio · LoRa 433 MHz · last 10 s

telemetry packet, 0.33 s on airthermal image packet, 0.57 s on aircalculated with the Semtech formula at SF8, 125 kHz

Ground station console

Telemetry format: PS, packet number, ms, state, altitude, vertical speed, air temp, humidity, tilt, spin, thermal min / mean / max, battery, colour frames, thermal frames, trigger.

Try it yourself

Release height SIM · the real release floor is set by BSA Descent speed SIM · set by our parachute design Wind SIM · pushes the parachute sideways Wind blowsTry strong wind toward the sea

Flight software settings used here (provisional)

≥ 30 m for 10 sarms by altitude, SAFE pin pulled
< 0.35 g for 0.15 sfree-fall vote
≥ 3 m below peakpressure-drop vote
> 90 °/s for 0.1 stumble vote
2 of 3 within 2 srelease decision
10 m below peakbarometer-only backup
still for 5 slanded, buzzer on
2 + 4 frames/scolour + thermal (sensor at 8 Hz)
every 5th packet16 × 12 thermal image

Thermal pixel size = 2 × altitude × tan(27.5°) / 32, from the 55° field of view in the Melexis MLX90640 datasheet. See the hardware and sources.