|
|||||||
6th Form Students Space Project
The Times newspaper reports on an experiment developed by 6th form students in Canterbury that will soon fly in space and involve students not just in the UK but also Uganda.
The article appeared in The Times 2 supplement for August 24 and describes how 6th form co-ed students at the Simon Langton Grammar school, led by Head of Pyshics, Dr. Becky Parker are developing a Cosmic Radiation experiment – LUCID – that will be part of the TechDemoSat-1 satellite. It is based around a Cosmic Ray detector chip from CERN and the school raised £60,000 to fund the experiment.
The school say that Dr Obote College in Uganda will soon be working with one of the LUCID cosmic ray detectors and Ugandan students will play an equal part with Langton students in collecting and analysing data on cosmic ray activity as part of an international experiment.
As part of the project Dr. Becky Parker is looking for money to install LUCID equipment in schools across the Britsh Isles and Europe providing ground-based data in a way that will involve hundreds of thousands of students.
TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1) http://www.sstl.co.uk/getattachment/Current-Projects/TechDemoSat-info-doc-190411.pdf
The Langton Star Centre http://www.thelangtonstarcentre.org/
Simon Langton – Dr Obote College in Uganda http://www.thelangton.org.uk/index.php/dr-obote
The Times ‘Sixth formers take on Nasa’ by Tom Whipple (Paywall)
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3143312.ece
SSTL successfully launches two further Earth Observation satellites
The latest Earth observation satellites from UK small satellite manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) were successfully launched today at 07:12:20 UTC onboard a Dnepr rocket from Yasny in southern Russia. NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X will significantly boost African capabilities for natural resource management, as well as aid disaster relief through the Disaster Monitoring Constellation.
NigeriaSat-2-complete
Science Minister David Willetts said: “The completion of this significant engineering project is testament to the success of the rapidly growing UK space industry. Not only are we producing technology and services that are in global demand but we are also helping more countries use satellite imagery to tackle important issues, including urban development and disaster relief.”
ARISSat in Emergency Mode
It has been reported that ARISSat-1 is in Emergency Mode in an attempt to conserve power.
10:24 UTC 22 August 2011
Weather Sat Picture Received With FUNcube Dongle
Herbert DL4SDR used an AMSAT-UK FUNcube Dongle VHF/UHF software defined radio
NOAA 15 Received With FUNcube Dongle
to receive a weather satellite picture in the 136-138 MHz band. On the FUNcube Yahoo Group he writes:
Today [August 19] I received a picture from NOAA 15 WX satellite with simple “stuff” FUNcube Dongle (FCD) and a VHF/UHF Ground Plane Antenna up 12 meters above ground , 200 meters above sea level, 15 meter coax cable WITHOUT pre-amplifier !
Hardware: FCDpro with newest Firmware V18.i with PC WinXP with onboard Graphics-Chip
Software: FCD-DF, Doppler-DF, SpectraVue, wxtoimage
Nice to see what’s possible with simple “stuff” :))
Regards from Germany
Herbert DL4SDR
In a follow up email he said he had also used a Ground Plane Antenna in the attic as well as one outside to receive the picture. He says he was surprised to get this good quality.
The FUNcube Dongle was developed as part of the educational outreach for AMSAT-UK FUNcube satellite project. Although it was designed to enable school students to receive the satellite beacon the wide frequency coverage of 64 – 1700MHz has meant that it can be used for many other applications.
The AMSAT-UK FUNcude Dongle SDR is sold by Martin Lynch & Sons (ML&S) at
http://tinyurl.com/MartinLynchFCD
FUNcube Yahoo Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FUNcube
AMSAT-UK International Space Colloquium Videos
Thanks to the hard work of volunteers from the British Amateur Television Club (BATC) 14 videos of the presentations given to the AMSAT-UK International Space Colloquium held in Guildford during July 30-31, 2011 are now available online.
The Chair of BATC Trevor Brown G8CJS edited over 16 hours of video to produce the final versions.
You can watch the videos online at http://www.batc.tv/
Click on the ‘Film Archive’ icon
Select ‘AMSAT 2011’ from the Category drop down menu
Click ‘Select Category’
Select the video you wish to watch
Click on ‘Select Stream’
Click the play icon ‘>’ on the player
Clicking on the icon to the left of the player volume control will give you full screen display.
You can also download a video file to your PC by clicking on the ‘Click Here’ link under the player.
Some of the PowerPoint slides are also available Here
AMSAT-UK publishes a colour A4 newsletter, OSCAR News, that is full of Amateur Satellite information. The Spring OSCAR News can be seen athttp://www.uk.amsat.org/on_193_final.pdf
Join AMSAT-UK online at http://tinyurl.com/JoinAMSAT-UK/
You must be logged in to post a comment.