UCI CanSat

CanSat is an international design-build-fly competition where student teams build a probe (the CanSat) to complete a specified mission.

Background

The CanSat is a science payload enclosed in a container. It is launched to 700 meters and must land safely. Initially, the payload and container descend under a parachute. At 450 meters, the payload and container separate. The container continues under the parachute, while the science payload deploys its delta glider to fly in a helical trajectory for 1 minute. At about 100 meters, the science payload will deploy its own parachute and fall to the ground. During all portions of the mission, the CanSat is recording environmental data from onboard sensors and streaming it in real time to a ground station computer.

Goals and Objectives

In addition to meeting our competition objectives, our team's goals are to provide all members with hands-on experience in engineering design. Over three quarters, we'll go from brainstorming and concept generation, to launching our flight hardware at the competition! We are a small team where everyone has a critical part to play during the life-cycle of this aerospace system.

History

UCI CanSat was founded in 2017 and was the first team to represent UCI in the international CanSat Competition at Tarleton University. Our team placed 1st place out of 100 teams during the Preliminary Design Review phase, 1st place out of 40 teams during the Critical Design Review phase, and was in the top 20 teams by the end of the competition.

Sponsorship & Donations

UCI CanSat is always open to making sponsorship and donation connections to fund the construction of our project and the travel costs of the team to attend the competition at Virginia Tech. If you are interested in sponsoring or donating to our UCI CanSat team, please contact us at cansatuci@gmail.com. 

Team Website: Please follow this link to our team website!

Team Contacts

UCI CanSat team, cansatuci@gmail.com

Brandon Wong (Project Manager), brandjw1@uci.edu

Advisor

Professor Roger Rangel, rhrangel@uci.edu

This is a page managed by the Engineering department. Please visit our team website https://sites.google.com/a/uci.edu/cansat/ to learn about our team, what we do, and how you can apply for Fall 2021!