| The Balloon-borne Imaging Testbed (BIT) is a stratospheric ballooning astronomy project that was successfully launched on September 18, 2015 from Timmins, Ontario to an altitude of 36 km over the period of one night. The design of the BIT gondola must allow the on-board telescope to maintain a constant position for an extended period of time during which the structure is subjected to external forces. Oscillations created by resonances of the gondola can prove detrimental to the resulting image quality. Therefore, the development of a modal analysis method for the gondola is explored in this thesis. This method combines simulation with measurement results to identify the modes of the system. For the gondola's external frame, the four lowest natural frequencies and their corresponding mode shapes are identified. BIT represents a new generation of balloon-borne telescopes that can produce images comparable to those of space telescopes but at significantly lower costs. |
