Slashdot Mirror
Student-Made Satellite Goes Into Orbit
College Student writes "A Satellite built by aerospace students from 23 university groups successfully took off from Plesetsk, in northern Russia. From the article: 'A Russian booster rocket successfully carried a satellite designed by students into a low Earth orbit yesterday for the European Space Agency under a programme intended to help to inspire and train future aerospace workers.'"
Some students made up some results and now the satellite is in the Pacific Ocean.
The first announcement (few hours ago) was that the satellite failed to get a signal, and I had given it up for dead.
Good thing it was easily fixed.
Now... for the results, please.
Reliability tests? Simple communications? My best guess is that it's a technology demo. But really, what is the science / learning that they're getting from it? Hope it's not just another piece of space junk floating about. But with 23 universities involved.. who uses the sat? how do they do the timesharing? how does it find use in classes? If they really wanted to teach people what goes into making a satellite then they could just have put the whole sat into a custom made simulator back on earth instead of actually putting it out in space. It would cost a lot less too!
"The washing machine-sized Student Space Exploration and Technology Initiative (SSETI) Express spacecraft took off from the Plesetsk launch site in northern Russia"
_ russiansat.html
Looks like we have a new measuring standard for use on Slashdot to replace VW Bug, or Library of Congress. Proper use of the standard will refer to how many "Washing Machines" an object going to, or coming from space is. 62Kg is the suggested weight in metric.
The satellite is designed to go into safe mode when a problem is encountered, and it has done this.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/051028_sseti
"ESA officials said the $121,185 (100,000 Euro) SSETI Express spacecraft entered a protective "safe mode" after accomplishing many of its initial objectives, including the deployment of three small, cube-shaped satellites built by universities in Germany, Japan and Norway."
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
http://littonlab.atl.calpoly.edu/
The article was notibly short on details, so here is a link to one of the satellites in the launch. This was an impressive feat for the schools involved and much was learned from the process.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Guess it just proves that it's easier to get a satelite in orbit these days.
I mean, Denmark have two satelites in orbit ( I think ). Despite our current government is cutting down on it ( though they are saying they are not ), pfft, politicians.
Anyways, I hope their satelite stays in orbit for a bit longer than that last one. :
Clicked pie.
http://sseti.gte.tuwien.ac.at/express/mop/ This is the SSETI Express team home page.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Student Space Exploration and Technology Initiative (SSETI) Express spacecraft...
In other news, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has filed for damages under intergalactic copyright law, fearing that hostile alien intelligences may mistake the antics of college students for examples of actual human behavior; an error which would inevitably lead to the mercy-killing of our species.
As a kid I'd read a book about some high school students building model rockets. The final scene was one where they'd put a mouse (named "Maika" IIRC, in homage to Laika) into a rocket and brought it safely back to earth. There were books like "Encyclopedia Brown" and "Danny Dunn" -- many used science or education to solve problems.
On a recent trek through a local Monstrous Book Store, I saw a different group of childrens' books... They talked about tolerance, religion, Barbie, single motherhood, Care Bears, Barney, Bratz... but scant few with scientists as the hero.
In fact, I turn on the TV or rent a DVD, and scientists (and knowledge for that matter) has become the scapegoat for all the world's ills. Toxic spills create monsters. Scientists create doomsday machines. Researchers unleash deadly viruses. And some nice guy who doesn't have all that there book learnin' comes and rescues everyone.
Now I'm not saying that movies should not be entertaining -- I enjoyed The Matrix not for its pseudo-mysticism but because of the cool fight scenes -- but please please please have a good guy scientist who gets the girl (or a good gal scientist who gets the guy) at least once a decade.
Ok, this is a shameless plug, but still a useful one :-) For those interested in Remote Sensing, as this story is about, there is a new slashsite, called http://slashgisrs.org/ that targets the RS and GIS crowd. The site is about one month old. Cheers :-)
Animoog.org
In the bit of undergraduate research that I've done, I've seen people forge data regularly out of laziness. Sometimes numbers were off from what was expected, but instead of redoing a run of the experiment, they just put in what they thought it should have been. The numbers are reasonable, but still, it's lying.
Anyone else have experience on this? I'm going to assume that graduate research is better with people who are more serious and care about what they do.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
It fell silent after failing to separate from its booster properly http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/051028_sseti_ russiansat.html
Brad: "My gum is where???"
Table-ized A.I.
this isn't a first by any means. Here at the University of Arizona, this is pretty common. I have a friend helping to build one of the next Mars orbiters, and students were also involved in builidng Spirit and Opportunity.
In Soviet Russia, rockets launch you!
I think it's European students, but yeah.
I see a collaboration between several European nations and the European Space Agency to get student involvement in space technology.
What kind of opportunities do we have here in the US to do something similar? Is NASA putting together a student cooperative to put a satellite in space? Bill O'Reilly and friends said that we're the #1 superduperpower, but we aren't doing stuff like this. Why?
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
transmit assignment master copies!!
Does this satelite actually work? It wont fall to pieces will it?
TFA mentions that one of the picosatellites will beam back pictures.
Anyone know what kind of resolution this thing has?
This has me wondering how expensive it would be to put one of these cams on a high-altitude balloon to get free-of-copyright basemap data. Not that I have the technical chops to do such a thing, but if this is possible is anyone going to do this soon, and will prices finally start falling?
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
One of those 'picosatellites' is the NCUBE-2 (cue bad la^Hgamer puns.) Sadly, at the moment it seems like it's a dead duck. HAMs can help listen for it, information on the NCUBE homepage. The other satellites are reported to be communicating with ground stations.
Look a monkey!
When my ashes are launched, I will become a circle of femtosatellites .
--
make install -not war
"I launched a satellite..." is a hell of a way to start a term paper!
Academic papers are meant to be written in the third person, so it would be "A satellite was launched..."
/pedantry
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
NO! Please DO NOT USE THIS ADDRESS!
;-)
please use: http://www.sseti.org/express
The former address is an internal writing of the latter and *will* change during the next days as our servers are suffering from overload since three days...guess why
Students have been building and launching satellites for some time. I worked on a purely student built satellite back in college in 1995 which was commissioned by Nasa: http://lasp.colorado.edu/snoe/overview.html
You should also avoid using the passive voice. Instead of "a satellite was launched", you should say "x team launched a satellite".
Sorry... so sorry... my poli sci professor beat this into my head and I can't help but correct! No offense!
Couple of friends of mine are on the Poly Cubesat project (I go there as well, but work across the street). Congrats to them.
More specifically, you write research papers in the passive voice, versus the active voice.
So at least before the batteries died, the student satellite did better than the Russian satellite which didn't even separate from the rocket. From oil companies going bankrupt to rockets that don't work, Russians are having a harder time than they normally do.
Old news, last weeks' news. I read/heard all about this last week. (abc.net.au/newsradio). This is not the "breaking news" I come to /. for! (Oops, and there's something for all you GGs).
Fred.
What's the name of the movie(s) that had a bright, funny
character (played by Barbara Streisand) meeting & romping
with a geeky scientist - eg, at a conference - while his
frumpy wife wobbled around the edges of the antics?
I can't recall whether the romps lead to a partner-change...?
Maybe movies like that should be revived & circulated, eg,
over [safer] P2P networks... a bit like Fahrenheit 451's
community of book readers arranged an alternative way
to circulate books (each "becoming" their book, by
memorizing it, so it could be passed on), at a time when
the gov't of the day saw even the -possession- of books
as a crime (at a time when sport ruled).
Perhaps this is already happening...? (If so, where?)
I've set free hundereds of baloons beyond the clouds before I was 12 months old
... students are learning all about "intelligent design"...
wow *surprised*
(not a sarcastic post)
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
American university have been doing this for over a decade, yet this is the third slashdot thread touting this ESA project. Yawn.