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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"
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.
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...
... 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."
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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