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Satellite Celebrates 20 Years Working in Orbit
lloydwood writes "The UoSAT-2/UO-11 small satellite was launched into low Earth orbit on 1 March 1984 from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Twenty years later, it's still in orbit and operational -- and we recently found launch footage. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of starting in orbit, the original video celebrating the UoSAT-2 launch is available (in windows media and mpeg). Thrill to the computers, the clothes, and the haircuts of 1984. SSTL has launched more than twenty satellites since."
Just wait, I'm calibrating the targeting device on my low orbit space modulator.
Hold it... Hold it........ Fire!
...it runs Unix.
FLR
Since when do we celebrate various equipment still working? Guess I better ready for my PS2's upcoming 2 year still working anniversary!
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
[Insert obligatory "1982 web servsr" joke]
With posting a 64-meg MPEG, I think we can be sure that their server won't have nearly the uptime of the satellite.
If it was made twenty years ago, wouldnt it have to be 10,000 times larger than a modern computer and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe would own them.
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Incidentally, that launch pad is about 3 miles from where I'm sitting. I can see it if I climb up on the antenna tower on the roof, but management got mad last time I did that to watch a launch.
Hey, some of us remember 1984, you insensitive clod!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Things like this should be publicized much more than the stupid mistakes NASA makes. It's hard to keep a car running 20 years even with a constant supply of oil and maintanence work. This is much cooler, and deserves more media attention than a mixing up of metric and Imperial measurements (all though the mixups are STILL important). Eh, just a quick rant.
... what did they do right that Skylab did wrong? Except not be a part of NASA, of course...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That has to be the absolute most lamest song I have ever heard in all my time on the Internet. It's a cross between New Order and a rocket science textbook.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Now if we had hardware/software that could do that you could truely run a business with 100% SLA. Of course if you had a bewoulf of these... ...I'll get me coat
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
I'm 'working' from home as we speak, but I'm not doing one damn thing useful.
"and the haircuts of 1984"
y /)
Those are not 1984 haircuts....Flock of Seagulls had 1984 haircuts....these are the haircuts of people that don't give a lot of wattage to personal apperance.
If they were closer to New York, we could give the Fab 5 a call! (http://bravotv.com/Queer_Eye_for_the_Straight_Gu
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
http://www.spaceimagingme.com/content/Constellatio n/Landsat/index.asp
Launch Date March 1, 1984
Launch Vehicle Delta 3920
Launch Location Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
Weight 1938 kg
Pheakin' bird was inctruckingcredibly sturdy.
Kinda cool, actually...
Downloading at: 45 KBps
30 seconds later...
Downloading at: 40 KBps
20 seconds later...
Downloading at: 35 KBps
The race is on! Will I get the file before the server dies?!?
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
So what is the life expectancy for this satelite?
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
Torren of the WMV file HERE.
This service brought to your courtesy of Soup, Bread, Linux.
I posted a mirror of the video here.
I must post this anonymously.
I was a junior engineer on the UoSAT-2/UO-11 project. Early into the project a group of military people visited us. We were asked various odd questions. This exchange in particular remains strong in my memory:
Military Man: Can we mount a laser into this satellite?
My Boss: No way, that'd require a lot of reenforcement of the tube chamber (back then we didn't have solid state).
Military Man: You could compensate with more fuel for launch. I'll approve it myself.
My Boss: But.. a laser? What size are you talking about and for what?
Military Man: [leans to assistant, whispers back and forth] We can tell you but your juniors [myself and 2 co-workers] will have to leave. [we did]
my boss left the project immediately and worked on a secret payload project overseen by the military. Whatever that bird has in it, it's looking down at us.
I had to explain to my wife that wearing it didn't mean I was old: it meant I was being post-ironic.
Although we can be reasonably well-assured that the computers were state-of-the-art at the time, the clothes and haircuts are another matter. Please remember that these are professional geeks we're talking about, and are therefore not exactly cutting edge when it comes to fashion. To all appearances it was closer to 1978 than 1984.
I know this because I was in college in 1984, and we all looked great, but these guys look like dorks.
And the brethren went away edified.
Considering that batteries die with age, solar panels degrade with exposure, and radiation of all sorts bombard the spacecraft. Also you have to have fuel to station keep, and it is only recently that ion thrusters have become available that dont require a lot of reaction mass to operate.
20 years of operation in the harsh environment of space gets my applause.
Duke Nukem: Forever was only 3 years into development.
and we recently found launch footage
Unfortunately they forgot to update the server it was originally hosted on way back in the day.
HALP! I've been kidnapped by the NAZI Bush regime!!!! -- Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Lawful President of the Soverign nation of Hati
Why do most sites that host large images/movies not supply magnet links? It'd save them loads on bandwidth and people could stop making jokes about the server.
(Not that I'm complaining about downloading at 215KB/s from the server..)
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
No, really, we believe you!
err..
I, too, must post this anonymously.
I was that Military Man. The project to which you refer was the 'Alan Parsons Project'. We were going to put a jumbo 'laser' on the moon as part of a world domination plan. Didn't work out for some reason, I think a British agent foiled the plan or something.
What about the amazing story of the Amateur Radio satallite Ostcar 7 that was launched in 1974, operated for six years, then died due to a shorted battery, only to re-awaken from the dead in 2002 after 21 years of silence.
So we have satellites that work after having been dead longer than your satellites have been alive.
Nyeah.
G.
Wow, that server went down in flames in record time! I hope they weren't serving that video off the satellite. ;)
UoSat is not a NASA satellite. It was built and is controlled by the University of Surrey (england to the geographically challenged). It carries ham radio gear and a store-and-forward repeater for NGOs in third world nations.
From here:
"Payloads [...] Speech Synthesiser"
What good will that do a satellite in orbit?
... webserver goes crashing down. She hasn't impacted yet, but she's burnin' up in the atmosphere as I type!
I just hope the satellite's not being controlled from that poor box....
~UP
Eat the Path.
I haven't seen anything built in the past 10 years that had an uptime of 20 years like this satellite.
UoSAT-2 was not a Nasa mission. It was built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in Guildford, a University town just west of London. We've grown quite a bit since then. We specialize in building small satellites (think 100 kgs, not 1000's of kgs). It's a different way of doing things to the way NASA and ESA usually does, but it's catching on.
Anyone happen to know which song plays on the video? It's actually quite good ...
Ground Control: Can you here me now?
UoSAT-2/UO-11: BEEP!!
Ground Control: Gooood!
You are the troll here!
now i will have to meta-moderate for the next couple of hours to find and bring this parent-post back to the surface.
Fight Frist Psoting!
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That's an Acorn BBC computer! (see 1st and 3rd picture from the top) Who'da thought I'd ever see one of those beauties again. 32 whopping KB of RAM and a Basic interpreter. Some of my best coding memories was on the 'beeb'!
ROTFL. that's the 3rd best reply ever on /. well done. (why the AC? afraid of getting marked flame?)
"Thrill to the computers, the clothes, and the haircuts of 1984."
I wonder if those same clothes, computers and haircuts are still in use at NASA...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Major Tom (Coming Home) - Peter Schilling
Imagine that, someone put up a satellite a whole 2 years before Mir went operational, and it's still there three and a half years after Mir was decommissioned.
Let me know if the ISS is still in one peice in 2017; then I'll be impressed.
Now listen to me, sonny. I work for the SIS, and I don't want you to ever repeat this story again. What happened was secret then, and is now. You may find your life getting a little more difficult if you tell anyone else, you see what I mean? Keep quiet.
I've ordered Taco to pull your post immediately. Remember, if you tell anyone else, we'll find you. I hear Belmarsh isn't too pleasant at this time of year.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
Now listen to me, sonny. I work for the SIS, and I don't want you to ever repeat this story again. What happened was secret then, and is now. You may find your life getting a little more difficult if you tell anyone else, you see what I mean? Keep quiet.
I've ordered Taco to pull your post immediately. Remember, if you tell anyone else, we'll find you. I hear Belmarsh isn't too pleasant at this time of year.
DAMN, I meant to post that anonymously. Now identity as a top-level agent trying to infilitrate Slashdot has been revealed.
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Is this a big deal? I ask, because,I don't know. In 1984, there were many satalites in orbit. Are they all gone? Is this significant or is the footage just cool?
Hey, that's a Lear Sielger ADM5 in some of those pictures. Cool! I have some of those here at my place. I think I'll go rub up against them right now.
Oh sure, a satellite that is hundreds of miles away from us gets a big listing just for turning 20. But my TI-35 calculator that's been working since 1983 gets no respect at all :)
-Cnik
If the UoSAT-2/UO-11 is still functioning after 20 years, why was there such a rush to deorbit the Iridium satellite constellation?
Well, as long as we're celebrating, today is the 20th anniversary of the launch of Landsat 5. If you want to talk about a work horse, it has been returning Earth observation data used by scientists everywhere for two decades as well. It just might outlive its successor.
Landsat 5
This satellite is barely past middle age. A quick google search finds that AO-7 is the oldest working satellite and it will turn 30 this year. Mark your calendars boys and girls. November 15 is the day when the _real_ excitement starts. I'm starting an iCal shared calendar right now so I don't forget it!
-?-
Hasn't the UK arm of the RIAA sued your pants off yet? The music on the video sounds familiar.
NASA's Pioneer 6 was launched on December 16, 1965. It was contacted in December 2000, when it was 35 years old. NASA doesn maintain regular contact with it but it's quite possible it's still functional. It was designed for a six-month mission to study the solar wind, magnetic field and cosmic rays. It is in solar orbit at about 0.8 AU.
thats a BBC model B home computer on the left in the first shot, whats on the right? IIRC it looks like a Prime terminal if anybody here is old enough to remember them!
I was going to say, in that video I saw one of the guys wearing a badge with the outline of Britian on it, and a Union Jack.
Also, did anyone notice the BBC Micro at the beginning of the video? They bring back memories, its what I learnt to program on, back in the day when you could get kids books on how to program from the library. Mind you, I also learnt about GOTOs and used them far too much.
AMSAT-UK is issuing 1000 special edition QSL cards to radio amateurs world-wide that submit signal/reception reports from the satellite during the month of March. Super-special edition QSL cards are given to radio amateurs who submit signal reports on March 1 (today), the satellite's anniversay.
... went out to the jeep and hooked my quad-band Yaesu VX-7R into a 5/8th wave magmount antenna (2-meter band) hoping to get the best possible reception I could with my gear. Adjusted for frequency doppler, and BAM! There it was... I had UO-11's telemetry on 145.825 ... got nice and loud during mid-pass ... record a WAV file of the telemetry when the signal was at it's best. When the sat was exiting my half of north america, I was still faintly hearing the telemetry on 145.820, adjusted down for doppler.
For the non-ham-operators among us, a QSL card (not SQL) is basically a post-card that hams send each other after making contact.
So earlier today, remembering that I had read about the March 1st QSL cards, I pulled up my handy sat prediction software (PREDICT) along with the equally handy gsat client, updated keplerian elements, synced my pc's time so I could achieve the most accurate predictions possible.
Had a good pass of UO-11 with about 50 degrees at elevation at 3:45 this afternoon (20:45 UTC)
So, of course, I submitted my signal report to AMSAT-UK this afternoon. They're going to verify my data, and I get a gold star when they're done. Today, I reached a new pinnacle of geekdom. Long live the hams!
de N1ZPP
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
According to this page from Surrey Satellite Systems, UoSAT-2 runs on a Microsoft platform. Doesn't that make it an evil entity on slashdot?
+1 Funny
I just downloaded the 56MB mpeg, and had to watch it twice. As they say in Britain: "BRILLIANT!"
I don't know what people are complaining about re bandwidth, I had a steady 130+kb, and the whole thing came down in just under 7 minutes.
The guys who put this together did an absolutely marvelous job. Who says engineers dont have a sense of humor (except maybe volkswagon owners).
I'd rather see this get an MTV award that JJ's titties anyday.
BTW: Most of that equipment brought back many nostalgic memories of sweating over dumb terminals, rewiring tty and serial links, fuming over line printer repair and maintance (remember those things, weighed as much as a 747, and about as loud).
It would be too Ironic if this was a spy sattelite, being launched in 1984 and all...
Yes, the laser was capable of vaporizing a man-sized object from space. The perfect "peacetime weapon." And let me tell you, there hasn't been a new working weapon since Korea.
Unfortunately, on its first test shot, the laser went off target and accidently destroyed a house by setting off a large charge of popcorn, then it melted down. Everybody wants to the rule the world!
I certainly noticed! Those Beebs were great machinea for their time. You could do so much with them, and interface with practically anything!
I've still got my Beeb up in the loft. Last time I tried it (last year) it still worked too! Can't say that about many 20+ year old computers!
I must dig it out again, and fire up Elite!
If it runs for twenty years, think of all the service packs and bug fixes they had to install. If I understand you correctly, then you mean that there is a computer system that can be patched without being rebooted. Well, that would be the greatest thing since sliced bread!
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I made this video, way back when. Very tediously, as I recall, the jvc editing system I was using (rented at $20/hr, I think) wasn't meant for music videos. The music is skewed from the images a bit on this mpeg version of a 3rd generation copy, so you don't get the crisp cuts that the original had, but the quality is quite good, considering. Anyway, the back story of the video was that UoSAT-2 was "lost" shortly after launch - the transmitter was off and it we couldn't make contact, making the words of the song relevant to those of us who had worked 24 hours a day to get it ready. I worked on the UoSat-2 DCE (digital communications experiment) one of the first non-military store and forward communications systems. After about 10 weeks, communications was established through sheer tenaciousness by the command crew (Neville Bean). A three instruction program was written in the DCE to bypass a failed command data path, and UoSAT-2 has been in business ever since. The whole thing made for great stories, damaging a big radio telescope trying to track fast enough to hear the local oscillator on the receiver (it did), talking the British truck driver into letting me drive the spacecraft from LAX to Vandenberg because he kept trying to shift the rented truck with the break instead of the clutch (I had to let him drive my new Firebird), etc. There is an in-joke every 10 seconds, though I haven't written them down in 20 years. Maybe next anniversary. To answer the usual question, the main processor is an 1802, the DCE has an NEC800 Z80/like processor. No Unix. - Harold
Utter tripe. For one, we don't say "tube" in the UK (UoSAT-2 is British).