Congratulations to Transition Year students Paula Davila, Ashling McCarthy, Aoife McDermott and Clara Rodriguez who have rocketed into the National Final of CanSat 2019. The girls competed against five other midland teams in the Regional Final, which was held at AIT on Wednesday, March 13th. The competition tasked the girls with designing and building a miniature satellite using the dimensions of a soda can, while incorporating all the major subsystems found in an actual satellite, such as power, sensors and a communications system.
Weather conditions were not ideal on launch day. However, winds calmed to enable the drone to take flight and drop each of the teams’ satellites. Our girls had a really successful drop with all required data being recorded during the decent, which the girls would later analyse. Their well-designed parachute successfully deployed and allowed for a smooth landing. The girls were more than happy to offer use of their parachute to two of the teams who experienced mechanical difficulties on the day. This perfectly illustrates the great sense of camaraderie and encouragement that was on show throughout the day amongst all the competitors.
The girls then analysed and plotted their data in order to present their findings to the competition judges from Blackrock Castle Observatory, Athlone Institute of Technology and the European Space Education Resource Office.
The team would like to thank their mentors Ms Coy, Ms Fox and Mr Vinas. They would also like to thank Marcus Rahilly, Paul Mulvey and Kevin McDermott from AIT, for the knowledge and skills gained during three workshops that were organised to help all of the participating schools build and program their CanSats. Our OLB CanSat team will now compete in the National CanSat finals in Portlaoise on May 2nd and we wish them every success.