On March 11, 2015, MinXSS was able to determine the position of the Sun and stably point there. We set up a mobile heliostat on the roof of the LASP engineering building to angle a projection of the Sun indoors. We strapped MinXSS down to a custom air bearing that Rick Kohnert built in his garage specifically for this purpose. The air bearing uses the same principal as an air hockey table to get rid of friction: it’s a floating hemisphere that the attitude control system on MinXSS can rotate without having to fight friction or other torques.
Check out the 8x time video!
