Hey All,
I just wanted to update everyone on what happened last week when we flew backwards.
Last week, Chris DeCollibus (TWR) looked into the surface dialogs from Silbo around those surfacings and found the answer. It seems that Silbo miscalculated the currents that it was encountering which resulted in the flying backwards. When the mission was reset after we gave Silbo a new way point, the calculations of the current showed a significant difference, and so when Silbo was flying towards the way point, he flew using his dead reckoning and the incorrect currents. This lead Silbo to believe that he would surpass the way point and needed to turn in order to arrive in the correct location. If he were to continue flying without turning, the logic of the glider believed that it would fly well beyond the way point. This mishap combined with the strength of these currents resulted in Silbo then flying 14km “backwards”.
Now we have new questions to answer: how can we speed Silbo up?
In the image above, I have taken the average velocity of Silbo for each segment he flies: red indicates the trip from Azores to Canaries and blue is the current mission. So far on this mission, Silbo has been flying significantly slower than on the previous mission. This potentially could be from the increased weight from the batteries over the previous configuration, but we need to discuss means of speeding up a bit. On another note, in figure above, the red line from the previous mission shows how towards the end of the mission the velocity decreasing by nearly 1/3. This correlates with the presence of the two barnacle cohorts described and analyzed here: http://www.i-cool.org/?p=11984
Force Wind Sea and Honor All!