Hi everyone,
Today, we waited all day. The order of flights is random, and the order is drawn on the fly. Therefore, we always have to remain ready for flights, but don’t know when our flight actually will be.
We know, however, that we are the 5th team flying tomorrow (we are told this in order to ensure that we show up at the correct time). In the meantime, here are some nice photos.
Teams getting ready to be transported to the flight line.
Rijesh, Sebastian, and Andrew performing a magnetometer calibration. This is important for correctly obtaining the yaw of the aircraft, which is important for geolocating images. Standing on one leg, as Andrew is doing, is not required for this calibration.
Johnathan, assisting with the magnetometer calibration as well.
Johnathan and Rijesh inspecting the aircraft’s elevator.
Jorge and Sebastian inspecting the autopilot flight plan. They did a lot of simulations today to verify the behaviour of the aircraft with different waypoint configurations.
Rijesh giving Andrew some much-needed encouragement. Andrew is working on putting our autopilot telemetry data, such as GPS coordinates, into the metadata of the images we capture, rather than in a separate file. This task has left him very downtrodden.
I’ll try to get a blog post out tomorrow afternoon, after our flight. Stay tuned for the results!
Cindy