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SuitSat Not Looking Good So Far
Hulboy writes "According to the SuitSat website, things aren't going well for the makeshift satellite in it's first few hours. 'Reports of nothing heard from Israel, Turkey, South Africa, and two negative reports from Japan as well as the weak report below. JH3XCU reports signal only heard in SSB mode, TX cycle and doppler detectable, but no modulation... this is not looking good.'
The suit itself: http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/articles/BauerSuits at/index.php
People that heard suitsat - looks like it went offline about 1hr 15min into flight.
http://suitsat.org/
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
People ARE reporting very weak contacts.
(Although some people are clearly mistaking the signals coming from the ISS with the SatSuit too).
So it is likely that the suit is still on the air, but radiating a lot lower signal than they planned.
I'm still planning on trying to hear it the next two passes here. 11 degrees and 72 degrees. Don't have fancy az/el antennas, but I've worked the ISS and AO-27 from here so I should stand a chance.
Grunts away!
Low earth orbit velocity is 7800m/s. The most likely, and worst way, to get hit by a paint fleck is to get hit by one in the same orbit but in the opposite direction, which would be a delta vee of 2*7800m/s.
Let's be really generous and say a paint fleck weighs 1g and hits the suitsat (say 100kg) dead on. By conservation of momentum, the suit's velocity will decrease from 7800m/s to... 7799.844 m/s.
In other words, it'll still be at 99.998% of it's original velocity. I won't bother calculating how little the fleck could have affected the spin, because it's not like the suit was spin stabilized to begin with. Spin fade was expected to begin with. The only significance of the fleck is that it would cause the suit to (slowly) depressurize, but more importantly possible trash the equipment if it was in the way.
My guess is that since the equipment wasn't really designed for this kind of orbital abuse: the nasty temperature shift between night and day just caused caused some circuitry to fail from thermal expansion. Or perhaps the suit leaked; the equipment wasn't designed to work in a hard vacuum.
The SuitSat is not a problem ... really. It's in an unstable LEO, probably tumbling all over the place, impacting all sort of other small debris. If anything, it'll clean a little bit of the crap out of its way as it comes down and burns up.
Now, if you want to talk about dangerous space junk, where you want to look is up in the higher orbits, the so-called "nuclear safe" ones. The Soviets had a series of spy satellites that (because they didn't want to have big solar panels on them in such low orbits) had nuclear reactors. Not RTGs, honest to god liquid-metal cooled nuclear reactors. They had a system to eject the reactor cores into high orbits before the satellites re-entered (which sometimes didn't work -- one of them contaminated quite a bit of Northern Canada). But even when the systems did work, the result was a rather largish chunk of very radioactive material in high orbit.
I'm sure there is probably a lot of other dangerous junk floating around out there, too. If you want to talk about space debris, it's out in the higher orbits that you really need to look. Especially because those are the places where you'd probably want to assemble a large space station (or park big, expensive satellites with large solar collectors), and that stuff doesn't like getting hit by old crap.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Exactly. It WAS recieved by many hams with the right gear. A friend of mine that works sattelites all the time was able to get a decent signal and could tell it was suitsat but the audio was garbled because what he said was "the suit must be spinning wierd". He was using a home brew ALT/AZ setup with a nice 2 meter quad and a tower mounted Recieve Preamp.
Everyone trying with their $12.00 radio shack scanner will be very dissapointed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Evidently most of the people who've replied on here don't have a clue about amateur radio either. A big part of amateur radio is experimentation and if it doesn't work, you figure out why and do it again. Hopefully with your adjustments, corrections and redesigns your experiment will become a working item. After all, how do you think all the neat modes in amateur radio were developed? Trial and error.
/.ers have no clue about working QRP (low power radio)-I mean, the thing is miles above earth transmitting on 500mW of power. Some personal stereos put out more power than that.
/. are about anything that doesn't have to do with Linux or MP3s.
Most
But, if anyone checks, there's another unused spacesuit and more equipment on the ISS. Oh, by the way, it's ARISS (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station) http://www.rac.ca/ariss that did this, not NASA.
If people RTFA and do a little more reading about the news stories http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2006/02/03/103/, they just might notice little things.
It's amazing how stupid most of these people on
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