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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.
Oh. We thought it was trash and scooped it up. Sorry. We'll drop it off somewhere the next time we're back to probe some rednecks.
Two orbits and it was fucked.
... why not stuff it in a suit, put some weak radio shit in there, and ... call it an EXPERIMENT!!! For the science and the children!! Think of the children!!!!!
... got that right.
My bet: there was something aboard ISS that was unsafe (alien maybe, bad yogurt experiment, etc) that needed to be dumped
confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image:"tiring"
Help them out here: http://suitsat.org/
gcc: no input sig
some other lab animal.. that would really suck if we couldn't talk to them during their final descent.
"What they say?"
"Hot hot hot HOT! HOT!! HOT!! HOT!!! AAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It is the ISS (Internaional Space Station)
The suit is an old Russian space suit.
So take your comment and cram it... I also hate that everyone presumes that when smart people conduct an experiment that they expect a successful result. Anyone who has worked in research can tell you that is just flat out wrong. I've had projects go completely wrong and still learned a great many things from them. It's like Edison's remark about knowing a multitude of new ways NOT to manufacture a lightbulb... It's just as important in making the journey to accomplish the goal successfully.
Blame the airhead that is controlling the damn thing.
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!
The ISS is in a low enough orbit (~400km) that this thing will not be there for very long. The odds of it causing a problem before it re-enters are very very small. At most, it will "only" take a few years to re-enter.
It's the stuff that gets left higher up that poses real risk, hence the change in attitude about blowing things up when you are done with them, and the desire to save fuel on spacecraft with propulsion to facilitate a controlled re-entry if possible (although that is also for safety reasons with big stuff that might hit somebody).
I was up at 0355L this morning to catch the second (and best) pass to see if I could hear anything and heard nothing... BUT I gave it another shot at 1021L this morning and heard data (somewhat strong at one point...) but not enough to decode. So there still is hope... As for another piece of junk floating around up there it will fall back to earth in about 6 weeks...
Might want to have your humor chip looked at. One way to tell when your joke is utterly lame is if even you feel the need to put "P.S. The above is a joke" at the end.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Now they've made it sound like anyone with a cheap receiver and a rubber duck antenna will be able to easily pick up this thing's signal full quieting from their basement. Keep in mind we don't know where it is other than "space" (which is rather far away from anyone on earth), it's transmitting at a low wattage, and it's impossible to predict the polarization of its antenna. Give it some time, set your SSTV software up to wait all day for a signal, and try an eggbeater antenna. It's still up there and it's apparently still transmitting.
... and was able to sneak out a copy of a comm transcript. TDRS picked up the signal at S+30 minutes (*).
... not funny guys. Houston, EVA3, do you read? ISS, EVA3, do you read? Come on guys, pick me up.
SuitSat (SS): (static)
CAPCOM: EVA3, Houston. Please maintain radio silence.
SS: Houston! EVA3. EVA1 and EVA2 insisted that I maintain radio silence during my initiation, too. However, they haven't picked me up yet, and the SAFER pack does not seem to be functional.
CAPCOM: EVA3, Houston. We have lost signal from the experimental AMSAT transmitter you are carrying. Is it suffering from an obvious malfunction?
SS: I had to remove its battery to power my suit. It lost power ten minutes after I was thrown overboard.
CAPCOM: EVA3, replace the transmitter's battery. Completion of its transmission was a condition of the low fare on your secret flight.
SS: Houston, the contract didn't state that I'd be free-floating without power during the transmission!
CAPCOM: Look Bass, why do you think we only charged to for a one-way flight?
SS: GAAAAAH! F*@$ you all, and all of Houston too, you dirty (LOSS OF SIGNAL)
PAO thought we should keep this under wraps, but I think the word needs to get out. Our new adminstrator deserves a metal for this.
(*): "Spacing plus thirty minutes."
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."
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
Your email has been returned due to insufficent voltage.
Someone managed to record a data burst from the suitsat:
2 006&p=47
http://www.william-jacobs.com/personal/rnr.php?y=
There is no such thing as a spherically symetric omni antenna. I wonder if the suit has found a stable attitude which points a bad lobe straight down. Other lobes are attenuated by the atmosphere or don't point at the Earth.
Properly designed LEO satellites take into account plasma flow at orbital altitude.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
NASA's Mission Control Centre in Houston, Texas, says the transmitter ceased operating very quickly after its deployment.
Darn, just like my home wi-fi network. Well I'm glad to hear NASA has trouble with these things too, makes me feel a little less inept...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
The following update was posted to the AMSAT Bulletin Board and now appears on the AMSAT HomePage.
SuitSat Status 4 Feb 2005
---For Immediate Release---
Silver Spring, Maryland
4 February 2006 at 22:00 UTC
Paraphrasing Mark Twain....the demise of SuitSat-1 is high exaggerated!!
It is now nearly 24 hours since the successful deployment of the SuitSat-1
experiment. These past 24 hours have been a wild ride of
emotions...tremendous highs...deep lows when people reported no signals and
said SuitSat-1 was dead and now....some optimism.
It is absolutely clear that SuitSat-1 is alive. It was successfully turned
on by the ISS crew prior to deploy and the timing, micro-controller
functions and audio appear to be operating nominally. The prime issue
appears to be an extremely weak signal.
I have heard several recordings and have monitored two passes today. When
the signal is above the noise level, you can clearly hear partials of the
student voices, the station ID and the SSTV signal. One of the
complicating factors in reception is the very deep fades that occur due to
the spin of SuitSat.
Based on the information we know thus far, one can narrow down the issue to
the antenna, the feedline, the transmitter output power and/or any of the
connections in between. Through your help, we would like to narrow down
the issue further and also gather some internal telemetry from the
Suit. If the transmitter is running at full power, we would expect the
Suit to end operations in the next few days to a week. If it is not, then
it will operate much longer. Since we do not know how long this experiment
will last, we ask for those with powerful receive stations to listen for
Suitsat---especially during direct overhead passes when the Suit is closest
to your area. If you can record these passes and send the audio to us, it
would be most appreciated. We will continue to be optimistic that this
issue will right itself before the batteries are depleted. So please KEEP
LISTENING!
Based on what we have learned, we would like to provide the following
guidelines to save you time and facilitate gathering information.
1) You need as high a gain antenna as possible with mast mounted
pre-amps. An arrow is the minimal set...it provides very brief snipets of
the communications. HTs and scanners won't cut it.
2) I would not waste your time on passes below 40 degrees
elevation. SuitSat is too far from your station to receive a reliable
signal. We have found that closest approach provides several seconds of
SuitSat communication with 22 element yagis.
3) The "gold" we are looking for right now is the telemetry information
and how long the vehicle stays operational. So if you hear any of the
telemetry, please let us know.
We are also working to get the voice repeater set up on ISS to downlink
SuitSat audio on 437.80 in the event that the ISS Kenwood radio can receive
the SuitSat transmissions. The repeater may be operational as early as
mid-day Sunday. Please do NOT transmit on 145.99, voice or packet, until
we have confirmed that SuitSat is no longer transmitting. These
transmissions interfere with our ability to hear SuitSat.
While the transmission part of the SuitSat experiment has not been stellar,
SuitSat-1 has been tremendously successful in several areas. Some of these
successes include:
-We have captured the imagination of students and the general public
worldwide through this unique experiment
-The media attention to the SuitSat project represents one of the biggest
ever for amateur radio
-We have had well over 2 million internet hits on www.suitsat.org today
-Our student's creative artwork, signatures and voices have been carried in
space and are on-board the spacesuit---the students are now space travelers
as the Suit rotates and orbits the Earth
-Carr