The project builds directly on our preliminary study, MAAT4KID. In that project, Christoph Lotz and his Team from Leibniz University Hannover developed an initial low-cost prototype within just five months that can measure accelerations, rotations, and environmental parameters. Although issues occurred during the rocket’s ascent in the capsules first flight on January 12, 2026, the capsule was the only system of this ride-share flight that was initiated during the uncontrolled descent and still managed to transmit at least some telemetry data from the capsule’s onboard systems. Due to the unexpected short transmission window unfortunately no payload data from capsule’s payloads wasn’t submitted. But our first demonstrator MAAT4KID made it to space and we learnt a lot in the design, test and integration phase. This gives us confidence and strong motivation for the new project. With MAAT4Space, the team now aim to combine more professional-grade sensor technology with higher data rates and integrated real-time data analysis.
Our goal is a modular, cross-platform system capable of delivering comparable data across drop towers, parabolic flights, sounding rockets, and orbital missions. At the same time, we are developing standardized evaluation methods that will benefit the entire research community.
