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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."
Actually, NASA had it's own operating system called PLEK-SLC for satelites back then.
Torren of the WMV file HERE.
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I posted a mirror of the video here.
Dude, it's, like, built around a Sinclair ZX80.
KFG
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.
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.
See http://www.amsat.org/. Some of the satellites are very easy to work - I've talked to NO-44 with a handheld before.
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'!
why was there such a rush to deorbit the Iridium satellite constellation?
They are fairly large birds, large enough that pieces of them may reach the surface, so they much prefer to deorbit them under control than wait for them to fail and reenter wherever they will.
Also, I recall hearing (but cannot confirm) that there is now an international treaty that puts some requirements on satellite operators to try to reduce the amount of space debris. One of the Motorolla guys on the Irridium project told me that each bird has a command-loss timer that, eventually, causes it to deorbit autonomously if nobody has talked to it for a long time. This is all hearsay; it'd be nice to hear from someone who actually knows something.
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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.
One reason was that they were a big pain in the butt for optical and radio astronomers. The sooner they were gone, the better. The satellites are still up there, and I assume the astronomers still wish they would go away.
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