Testing a 14 ft long tube kite tail (the one we will use for the actual flights will be 65ft long)
Hi, I’m Ben Carpenter. I am interning with Oklahoma State University for aerospace engineering. This week has been exciting. The first few days I continued my work with the hot wire foam cutter. We calibrated it and began cutting test blocks and wings to make sure that we understood the machine. Unfortunately, the people who originally bought the machine were no longer working there, so anytime we had a question or concern about the machine we had to figure it out ourselves. Then, on Thursday, the AREN team went to Tulsa, OK to use the wind “wall” at the OSU Tulsa campus. We were testing various types of kite tails to see which ones produced the best drag and why. This was an all day experience, and boy was it a long day. We left the Stillwater campus at 8 am and didn’t get back until around 6:45 pm. We tied the kites to vernier force sensor, and then put an aerodynamic fairing around it so we could get more accurate readings. This was okay because we got a lot of valuable data and are now even more prepared for a flight test we have coming up. We also got some hail on Thursday in Stillwater. It seems that once a week we get a really big storm and a whole bunch of tornado watch alerts. I have yet to see a tornado.
This was us setting up the fairing for the force sensors.
One of the many foam 
pieces we cut
A block of foam ready to be cut
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