An orion rocket can carry up to 4 experiments in a stacked arrangement. Our experiment EDOD will be mounted in the so called nosecone adapter at the top of the rocket. This means that after the jettison of the nosecone EDOD will be „outside“.

The cube including the bobbin with the coiled booms and the sail is fixed to the nosecone adapter by using a central tube in order to establish a maximum distance to the nosecone adapter. This distance is required when thinking about the objective to record the deployment using cameras.

Black and reflecting markers attached to the sail and the booms are needed for the photogrammetric processing of the recorded data. For an analysis in the three dimensions two cameras need to see the same marker at the same time. Monitoring could be done with 4 cameras depending on the camera’s field of view. Furthermore two additional cameras are aligned to the rockets centre line. One of these transmits the recorded data to earth via the TV-Channel of the rocket. The other data is stored within EDOD and can then be accessed after the recovery of the rocket.

Due to the extremely varying lighting conditions at the altitude of 100 kilometers EDOD will provide its own lighting source. The LEDs used for this will only be activated during the deployment of the sail. We are currently working on a concept for a control unit triggering the deployment in dependence of the lighting conditions. The idea is to use photo transistors during a predefined time window in order to get information about the actual position of the sun.

For safety reasons it will be mandatory to eject the cube and the sail after its deployment and before the rockets reentry. Otherwise the sharp-edged booms could damage the parachute used for the recovery during reentry. This would also compromise the recovery of other experiments. For this reason an ejection mechanism is placed below the cube.