KickSat is an amateur radio CubeSat technology demonstration mission designed to demonstrate the deployment and operation of 200 prototype Sprite “ChipSats” (femtosatellites) developed at Cornell University by Zac Manchester KD2BHC.
It plans to launch on ELaNa-5 / CRS-3 from Cape Canaveral in July 2013 into a 325 x 315km 51.5 degree inclination orbit. Kicksat-1 will operate on 2401.2-2436.2 MHz and when deployed all the 200 Sprites will operate on a single frequency 437.240 MHz and use CDMA. It is believed this will be the largest ever deployment of satellites.
Hojun Song DS1SBO and the NovaNano FlyMate deployer
On Monday, November 26 at 12:10 CET Swedish Radio broadcast a show about the Maker Movement that included an item on Hojun Song DS1SBO and the OSSI CubeSat that is planned to launch on a Soyuz-2-1b rocket into a 575 km 63° inclination orbit in April 2013.
CubeSats at San Mateo College Makerspace Launch Event
On September 10, the “MENTOR Makerspace” program kicked off with a special event held at the College of San Mateo. The MENTOR Makerspace program has a goal of introducing low-cost makerspaces into 1,000 high schools over the next three years.
NASA’s Matthew Reyes attended the event and in this interview with Tony Wan he explains how students from San Jose State University went from tinkering in their local TechShop to exploring the final frontier.
The 27th AMSAT-UK International Space Colloquium will be held on the weekend of 15-16 September at the Holiday Inn Hotel, Guildford, GU2 7XZ, England close to the University of Surrey. UPDATE: For a video of the presentation see http://www.uk.amsat.org/?p=10297
The technology camp EMF 2012 being held at Pineham Park, Milton Keynes runs from Friday August 31 to Sunday, September 2. BBC TV reports that two 20m high masts linked by microwaves have been erected for the event, one at the campsite and the other in the car park of a data centre 2.5 km away.
Among the weekend of presentations are some by radio amateurs such as Adam Greig M0RND (formerly M6AGG). Adam is a member of the UK High Altitude Society (UKHAS) and Cambridge University Space Flight (CUSF) and will be talking about High Altitude Ballooning. The balloons use 434 MHz for the telemetry and video image downlinks.
Part-Time Scientists team members Robert Böhme and Karsten Becker
The Google Lunar X-Prize team Part-Time Scientists delivered a presentation Not your Grandfathers moon landing at the Chaos Communication Congress.
The YouTube description reads:
Karsten Becker, Robert Böhme: Not your Grandfathers moon landing
Hell yeah, it’s Rocket Science 3.1415926535897932384626!
The basics, we are team of part-time scientists and engineers who want to send a rover to the moon before the end of the year 2013. There is a lot to be done towards this first private moon landing and we want to take the chance to explore what we want to do and show what we already accomplished in the past 12 months. The talk will feature important technical milestone like our very first R3 rover prototype and great events like the CCCamp11. There is also be a live demonstration of the very first R3A rover right in the presentation.
We want to take this chance to present where we are and what is next to go on the worlds first private mission to the moon. 2011 was great and we want to show you some of our personal highlights like us actually doing real rocket science at the CCCamp11. We will have a close look at the first R3 Rover prototype how it got made and all the cool things we already did with it and going to test along the next year.
We’re aiming for a pretty quick and dense 30 minute review of 2011 with an outlook for 2012 and then do a live presentation of the R3 rover with an open Q&A round.
This time we split our efforts and got our most interesting presenters to enroll for separate talks on one self picked exciting topic they worked on this year in their own free time.
Watch 28c3: Not your Grandfathers moon landing
Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) issues the team encountered are discussed at 19:15 into the video.
A high quality version of this video can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/vROKTo
In the second presentation Wes Faler talks about Evolving custom communication protocols – Hell Yeah, it’s rocket science
Even after years of committee review, communication protocols can certainly be hacked, sometimes highly entertainingly. What about creating a protocol the opposite way? Start with all the hacks that can be done and search for a protocol that gets around them all. Is it even possible? Part-Time Scientists has used a GPU to help design our moon mission protocols and we’ll show you the what and how. Danger: Real code will be shown!
Watch 28c3: Evolving custom communication protocols
A high quality version of this video can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/vOzAsF
It’s 43 years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Now a group of volunteer hackers and engineers are about to send a privately-built amateur radio rover to the Moon.
Simon says the Part-Time Scientists are putting together a cloud-linked global communications network [COMRAY] to handle radio links to their lander and rover (using amateur radio bands), there’s still too much lag in the system to deliver a hands-on driving experience. The rover needs to have some smarts in order to process information about its environment, while still handling input from a driver on Earth.
The crowd-sourced funding website Kickstarter, which has been used for amateur radio projects in the USA, is to launch in the UK this autumn.
Radio ham Zac Manchester KD2BHC used Kickstarter to raise $74,586 in donations to fund the development and deployment of over a hundred amateur radio KickSat sprite satellites.
The amateur radio satellite project ArduSat managed to raise donations of $80,379 in just 26 days.
Kickstarter is not just about raising large sums of money, for example Sandy Antunes used Kickstarter to raise $2,780 to buy a ham radio transceiver and antennas to create an amateur radio satellite ground station Calliope
NanoSatisfi founder Peter Platzer appeared on the Japanese NASDAQ TV feed to talk about the ArduSat satellite.
ArduSat is an open-source arduino-based nanosatellite. It will have an extensive sensor-suite onboard and will allow users to upload their own code and run their own experiments.
ArduSat will use a GomSpace NanoCom U482C which is a half-duplex UHF transceiver, capable of up to 3W, operating in the 435-438 MHz amateur radio satellite band. It implements Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Viterbi coding based on the CCSDS standards in order to improve reliability and throughput of the space link.
The project is raising donations through the Kickstarter site at http://nanosatisfi.com/ In just over a week they raised more than $43,000 in pledges from almost 300 donors.
Watch NanoSatisfi NASDAQ interview which is in English with Japanese sub-titles
Watch ArduSat Kickstarter Thank you
It is understanding the team are now aiming for a larger 2U CubeSat instead of the 1U originally planned.
NanoSatisfi was founded by Austrian-born Peter Platzer a former high-energy physicist (CERN), former Hedge Fund Quantitative Trader, avid HP-41 hacker and Arduino enthusiast, along with Belgian aerospace engineer Jeroen Cappaert intern at NASA Ames Research Center, Canadian aerospace engineer Joel Spark intern at EADS Astrium and Hungarian Reka Kovacs intern at NASA Ames Research Center working on alternative methods of public outreach for space science. The four founders met at the International Space University in Strasbourg and thought that they could do something to provide affordable, open-source space exploration for everyone.
Have you ever wanted to build your own personal satellite but your last name doesn’t start with Gates or Branson? Well, now there’s good news. For the price of a car you can now build, test and launch your own personal satellite at home.
Dr. Sandy Antunes, Author of DIY Satellite Platform, talks about building his own amateur radio personal spacecraft Project Calliope. The best part (besides having your own satellite) is that you can now do some serious science.
Find out what kind of satellite Dr. Antunes is building and how he’s running the same kinds of tests the large Aerospace companies do, but for a fraction of the cost.
