Slashdot Mirror
Old Spacesuits are Potential Satellites
SpaceAdmiral writes "In order to determine if old spacesuits can be effective satellites, the crew on the International Space Station will be throwing one overboard on February 3rd. The SuitSat will transmit information about its condition and, if you happen to have a ham radio or a police scanner, you can tune in when it passes your city! You can use NASA's J-Pass utility to determine when it will pass above you."
Given the alarming problem of space junk, is this a really wise thing to do?
After all, the problem is so severe that Slashdot had two stories on it in four days. Honestly, aren't the NASA folks even reading Slashdot anymore? ^_^
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
If you just want to get it into the atmosphere as quickly as possible, and if the amount of energy you can put into it is fixed, then you want straight down. No other direction will have as much magnitude in the vertical axis as straight down, after all.
On the other hand, if your goal is to get it to burn up, then you definitely don't want to get it into the atmosphere as quickly as possible--you want it in the atmosphere as long as you can keep it there without the temperature going below the flash point of whatever you're littering. Watch Apollo 13 for a colorful example of why (although they were trying to avoid what you're trying to do).
Yup. You could build a nice little super-regenerative receiver with maybe two or three transistors and some passives. The two nice things about that is a) they're very very simple, and b) they're not very selective - they pick up a fairly broad range of frequencies. So, no worries about Doppler as the satellite passes overhead.
Hang a decent preamp and antenna off it and you should be able to hear everything going.
You've got a week to build it all. Plenty time.