Establishing downlink…
Mission NIMBUS · Payload SAT-1

Junarakar Sat-1 Near-space telemetry

A balloon-borne instrumentation platform built by students to sound the lower atmosphere — pressure, temperature, humidity, air quality and attitude, streamed to the ground over LoRa and GSM in real time.

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Atmospheric soundingLoRa 433 MHz downlinkBMP280 · DHT22 · MPU6050 · MQ-135 Custom flight PCBGSM backup telemetryVadodara · Gujarat · India Atmospheric soundingLoRa 433 MHz downlinkBMP280 · DHT22 · MPU6050 · MQ-135 Custom flight PCBGSM backup telemetryVadodara · Gujarat · India
Telemetry packets 0
GPS fixes logged 0
Ground track 0km
Flight duration 0min
The mission

Sounding the sky
with a payload
we built ourselves

NIMBUS is an atmospheric monitoring initiative from The Space Association at BVM Engineering College. A single flight-ready unit carries the full sensor stack, an in-house flight computer and a redundant radio chain — cheap enough for a student team, rigorous enough to produce data worth analysing.

Every packet the vehicle has ever sent is archived and replayed through the mission control console on this site. Nothing here is a mockup.

01
Real-time atmospheric sensing

Dual temperature and humidity channels, barometric pressure, derived altitude and an air-quality index, sampled continuously through ascent and descent.

02
Long-range, low-power downlink

LoRa carries telemetry tens of kilometres on milliwatts. A GSM path runs in parallel so a lost radio link never means lost data.

03
Attitude & trajectory reconstruction

A 6-axis IMU logs roll and pitch alongside GPS, letting us rebuild the flight path and the vehicle's behaviour under the balloon.

04
STEM outreach by doing

Component selection, PCB layout, structural design, RF testing and recovery — all carried out by undergraduates, documented publicly in the mission logs.

Programme timeline

From sketch
to flight article

All mission logs
Dec 2024

Team formed, mission defined

The crew came together around a single question: how cheaply can a student team put a genuinely useful atmospheric instrument above the weather?

Jan — Mar 2025

Bill of materials & component arrival

Microcontroller, sensor suite and radios selected for reliability per rupee, then bench-validated one subsystem at a time before anything was integrated.

Apr — May 2025

LoRa range campaign

Weeks of field testing on encoding, packet structure and antenna placement, ending in a full breadboard integration with every subsystem live at once.

May — Jun 2025

Flight PCB & structural design

The prototype collapsed onto a custom board — component placement, signal integrity and power distribution — while the chassis was modelled for thermal and aerodynamic behaviour.

Jul 2025

Assembly & qualification

Board bring-up, harness integration and end-to-end rehearsal of the telemetry chain from sensor to ground console.

Dec 2025 — now

Flight operations

Live sorties over Gujarat. The archived flight record on this site is replayed packet-by-packet through the mission control console.

Visual data feed

Mission film

NIMBUS_INTRO_SEQ_V4
● REC · onboard archive
Latest transmissions

Mission logs

Open the archive
JUNARAKAR SAT-1 NIMBUS · TSA × BVM
Programme identity

The emblem

A balloon climbing out of the troposphere with the payload slung beneath it, over the limb of an Earth the crew has only ever seen from the ground. The dashed ring is the flight track; the beacon on the payload is the downlink.

ProgrammeNIMBUS
VehicleJUNARAKAR SAT-1
SegmentBalloon-borne · near space
OperatorsTSA × BVM Engineering
BaseVadodara, Gujarat
Behind the programme

Partners

The Space Association

The Space Association

Est. 2020 · Vadodara

A student body dedicated to space science and hands-on engineering. TSA runs the programme, the flight campaigns and the outreach around them.

Strategic partner
BVM Engineering College

BVM Engineering

Est. 1948 · Anand

Birla Vishvakarma Mahavidyalaya provides the laboratories, instrumentation and faculty mentorship that make a flight-grade build possible on a student budget.

Academic partner
Ground segment

Watch the vehicle fly

The console replays the archived flight record in real time — vitals, attitude, charts and the live ground track, exactly as the operators saw it.