Tag Archives: Space

Feb 25 2012

Antares Launch Slip Delays Dove-1 Satellite

Artists Impression of Antares Launch from Wallops Island, Virginia

The amateur radio satellite Dove-1 (145.825 MHz AX.25 FM) was originally planned to launch on the Antares launcher on February 28 but reports indicate it may be Fall before it is launched.

Space.com reports that on February 21 Orbital Sciences Corporation announced a further slip and the launch of Antares could now be delayed until as late as September. Read the space.com report here.

Dove-1 was built by Cosmogia and is a 3U CubeSat with a total mass of about 5 kg.

Its 145.825 MHz 1200 bps AFSK AX.25 FM downlink will transmit telemetry data, including temp/power supply/current/RSSI/solar vector/acceleration, approximately every 30 seconds. The beacon can transmit at up to 1 watt and will use a quarter wave monopole antenna cut from a tape measure.

It also has a 2.4 GHz half-duplex, spread spectrum radio with patch antenna that will be used for main payload downlink and telecommand uplink. The data rate will be 115 kbps.

The planned orbit is 280 by 270 km at 51.6 deg inclination which will give Dove-1 a lifetime of about 2 weeks before re-entry.

Dove 1 Satellite Technical Description https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=121393&x=. 

Cosmogia Dove-1 Orbital Debris Assessment Report (ODAR) https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=122025&x=.

Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares page http://www.orbital.com/Antares/

IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination Pages hosted by AMSAT-UK http://www.amsat.org.uk/iaru

Feb 21 2012

ARISS educative contact planned with Italian school

An Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) school contact has been planned with participants at 1° Circolo Didattico Nicola Fornelli, Bitonto, Italy on 24 Feb. The event is scheduled to begin at approximately 14:01 UTC.

The duration of the contact is approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds. The contact will be direct between OR4ISS and IZ7RTN. The contact should be audible over Italy and most of Europe. Interested parties are invited to listen in on the 145.800 MHz downlink. The contact is expected to be conducted in English.

1° Circolo Didattico “N. Fornelli” Bitonto is an educational primary school, placed in the centre of the pleasant town of Bitonto, Apulia, south of Italy, the “olive town” famous all over the world. This is the oldest elementary school in Bitonto, an architectural building in the centre of the city. In the primary school there are 810 students. There are 4 nursery schools with 415 pupils. The school has large open spaces, a gym, a library with about 6000 books and 4 laboratories.

Participants will ask as many of the following questions as time allows:
1. What do you feel when you float weightlessly in the Space Station?
2. What is the temperature outside the ISS?
3. How can you avoid collisions with meteoroids or space debris?
4. On board the Space Station, is there a system to recycle oxygen?
5. How long is the rehabilitation to the Earth’s gravity when returning on Earth?

6. What feelings do you experience living for such a long mission surrounded by the immensity of space, do you feel privileged?
7. What inspired you to become an astronaut?
8. What temperature are tolerable by a space suit?
9. What kind of studies did you attend to become an astronaut?
10. What is the most difficult task for the commander of the International Space Station?

11. What kind of experiments are currently underway aboard the ISS?
12. Which part of our planet are you looking at right now?
13. During the day do you have free time?
14. Do you feel safe on board the ISS?
15. Who would you like to dedicate this experience in space?

16. How would your life change after this adventure in space?
17. Are you in contact with your family and how do you communicate with them?
18. What is the future for space exploration?
19. In your opinion is life possible in the universe?
20. Do you believe that it is possible to create a human colony on the Moon?

ARISS is an international educational outreach program partnering the participating space agencies, NASA, Russian Space Agency, ESA, CNES, JAXA, and CSA, with the AMSAT and IARU organizations from participating countries.

ARISS offers an opportunity for students to experience the excitement of Amateur Radio by talking directly with crewmembers on-board the International Space Station. Teachers, parents and communities see, first hand, how Amateur Radio and crewmembers on ISS can energize youngsters’ interest in science, technology, and learning.

73

Gaston Bertels, ON4WF
ARISS Chairman

Feb 17 2012

Khartoum Students Receive CubeSats

KN-SAT1 students at ST2UOK Khartoum

KN-SAT1 students at ST2UOK Khartoum

Students at the University of Khartoum, Sudan have been eagerly listening for the new amateur radio satellites deployed by the Vega launcher on Monday, Feb 13.

The students are undertaking a CubeSat project KN-SAT1. As part of the project they recently completed the installation of a satellite groundstation at ST2UOK. This was used to track and receive telemetry data from the Vega satellites.

KN-SAT1 is the first CubeSat to be built in Sudan and an aim is to promote space engineering and space science education at other Sudanese educational institutes.

Watch the students receiving packets from Masat-1 14:00 UTC Feb 14, 2012

KN-Sat1 http://cubesat.uofk.edu/

Sudanese Amateur Radio and SWL History http://www.st2nh.com/sudanamateurradioandswlhistory

ST2NH Blog http://st2nh-blogger.blogspot.com/

Feb 15 2012

NASA Announces Third Round Of CubeSat Space Mission Candidates

Roland Coelho WH7BE Research Associate at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, with a CubeSat - Image Credit NASA

Roland Coelho WH7BE Research Associate at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, with a CubeSat - Image Credit NASA

NASA has selected 33 small satellites to fly as auxiliary payloads aboard rockets planned to launch in 2013 and 2014. The proposed CubeSats come from universities across the country, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, NASA field centers and Department of Defense organizations.

CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites. The cube-shaped satellites are approximately 10 cm long, have a volume of about one litre and weigh less than 1.3 kg.

The selections are from the third round of the CubeSat Launch Initiative. After launch, the satellites will conduct technology demonstrations, educational research or science missions. The selected spacecraft are eligible for flight after final negotiations and an opportunity for flight becomes available. The satellites come from the following organizations:

— Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio
— Air Force Research Lab, Wright-Patterson AFB
— California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
— Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
— Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
— Montana State University, Bozeman
— Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif. (2 CubeSats)
— NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
— NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
— NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in partnership with the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (2 CubeSats)
— NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Fla.
— The Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, Silver Spring, Md.
— Saint Louis University, St. Louis
— Salish Kootenai College, Pablo, Mont.
— Space and Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, Ala. (2 CubeSats)
— Taylor University, Upland, Ind.
— University of Alabama, Huntsville
— University of California, Berkeley
— University of Colorado, Boulder (2 CubeSats)
— University of Hawaii, Manoa (3 CubeSats)
— University of Illinois, Urbana (2 CubeSats)
— University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
— University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, N.D.
— University of Texas, Austin
— US Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colo.
— Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg

Thirty-two CubeSat missions have been selected for launch in the previous two rounds of the CubeSat Launch Initiative. Eight CubeSat missions have been launched (including five selected via the CubeSat Launch Initiative) to date via the agency’s Launch Services Program Educational Launch of Nanosatellite, or ELaNa, program.

For additional information on NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative program, visit: http://go.usa.gov/Qbf

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/

Source NASA

AMSAT Fox-1 Amateur Radio CubeSat selected for NASA ELaNa launch collaboration http://www.uk.amsat.org/4558

Feb 12 2012

Open Mission Control Software for Satellite & Balloon Projects

Open Mission Control

Open Mission Control

Open Mission Control is open source, open access software for monitoring and controlling small spacecraft or balloon projects.

The software is designed to provide an application and framework that can be adapted quickly and easily to support a variety of spacecraft including CubeSats, myPocketQubs and NanoLab experiments, and sounding rocket and high altitude balloon experiments.

The team include students, space professionals, educators and enthusiasts from around the world, all working together to build a great mission control application for small spacecraft projects.

The Open Mission Control framework consists of the application and graphical user interface which contain the basic structure of the program, and the Open Mission Control toolbox, which provides a number of ready to use functions typically required for mission control applications.

The Open Mission Control application and graphical user interface can be adapted to a project quickly and easily, by populating them with elements from the Open Mission Control toolbox and other standard library elements. This approach allows also users with limited programming experience to create sophisticated mission control software by building on a solid basic implementation.

Designed to work with any spacecraft project, the first flight mission that is expected to use Open Mission Control is myPocketQub442. Developed by UK Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (UKSEDS) myPocketQub442 was selected to fly as a pocket spacecraft attached to UKube-1, the first United Kingdom Space Agency CubeSat. It is expected to be the first mission controlled by Open Mission Control and to demonstrate and verify various use cases:

+ The first use case is for professional monitoring, command and control of a real spacecraft.

+ The second use case involves schools and universities using Open Mission Control to upload their virtual payloads for their OpenSpace365 projects, monitor their experiments as they run and download the data for analysis.

+ The third use case involves the use of Open Mission Control as monitoring software for the various scientific and engineering sub-payloads that will fly on myPocketQub442. The students conducting these experiments will use Open Mission Control to access and store the data from these payload experiments for analysis and research.

+ The fourth use case is communication with engineering models of the real spacecraft which will be made available on the Internet. These engineering models are duplicates of the flight hardware and allow Open Mission Control to command and monitor them and their sub-payloads in real time and to simulate different critical mission phases under real conditions.

Additional information and links are available on the Open Mission Control webpage at: http://openmissioncontrol.wordpress.com/

Feb 9 2012

ISS APRS Balloon to Launch Saturday

BLT-28 Katy to Nanjing

BLT-28 Katy to Nanjing

A group of amateur radio operators aims to establish a world record for distance by flying an unmanned, helium-filled balloon from Katy, Texas, across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean then on to Nanjing, China.

During the trans-Atlantic crossing, when out of range of shore based stations, the balloon’s APRS beacon will operate on the International Space Station (ISS) packet digipeater frequency of 145.825 MHz.

The South Texas Balloon Launch Team will release the balloon at 3 pm CST (2100 UT) Saturday, February 11.

The balloon payload package weighs only about 150 grams and contains a high altitude GPS tracking system and a 144 MHz FM APRS amateur radio transmitter. To conserve weight and battery life, no camera equipment will be on board. The maximum altitude is expected to be above 30 km, with horizontal speeds between 160 and 240 km per hour. The balloon size will increase from about 1.5 metres to about 11.8 metres at maximum elevation. Recovery of the payload package is not expected.

Individuals may follow the balloon’s progress on the Internet by logging onto APRS tracking site, filling in the “Track callsign:” field with “kt5tk-11” and changing the “Show last:” field to 24 hours.

The APRS telemetry transmitter is frequency agile to cope with different APRS standards across the globe. The frequencies used will be:
USA = 144.390 MHz FM
mid-Atlantic = 145.825 MHz (International Space Station packet digipeater frequency)
Europe = 144.800 MHz FM

APRS tracking site http://aprs.fi/

Read the Katy Times story at
http://katytimes.com/news/article_b2683a60-527e-11e1-bca4-001871e3ce6c.html

BLT-28 The Flight of the Orient Express http://www.w5acm.net/b28.html

South Texas Balloon Launch Team http://www.w5acm.net/

QRP APRS to the ISS http://www.uk.amsat.org/3838 

Qtmm AFSK1200 soundcard modem software for decoding packet radio, APRS and telemetry from amateur radio satellites http://www.uk.amsat.org/4313

Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) http://www.aprs.org/

Link to UZ7HO Soundmodem 1200 bps packet and other APRS software http://wa8lmf.net/miscinfo/