It's their own little piece of space adventure.
A student and seven students from the Mechanical and Productive Engineering specialty of the IUT de Nantes patiently designed and manufactured an antenna that enabled them, as well as a group of schoolchildren, to interact with the International Space Station ISS, during a ten minutes this Wednesday.
A project which was selected by Ariss France, which links radio amateurs and schools with space and which took them a year of work.
"They each spent more than 300 hours on the project, or more than 3,000 hours of work," smiles Frédéric Castells, the professor who accompanied them.
We went to the end of a dream, it's a real technical and human adventure.
The mayonnaise had a hard time taking, but in the end, it was they who came to pick us up and we were spectators: they knew how to do everything!
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"An intense emotion"
The best proof of their involvement was that once they graduated in June 2021, they were all present to see this piloted antenna work.
They are the ones who drew up the plans, machined the parts and assembled an antenna capable of following the International Space Station launched at 28,000 km / h.
"The margin of error to reach it is 10 °, and we managed not to let go of the space station by less than 1 °", welcomes the teacher.
Communication took about thirty seconds to establish.
The dialogue with the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet was then able to begin.
"There, it was intense as emotion", admits Frédéric Castells.
The antenna will now be used for other specialties of the IUT, in particular so that thermal engineering students can take solar radiation readings.
