Fly Your Own Experiment In Space

An anonymous reader writes "Want to fly your own experiment in space? dvice are reporting on a project called Ardusat — a satellite based (unsurprisingly perhaps, given the name) on Arduinos. For $500 you can upload your own code to the satellite, and run your own experiment for 1 week. Experimenters will have access to a veritable battery of 25 sensors including magnetometer, geiger counter, accelerometer, gas sensors and various others. As well as allowing for affordable space science, this sounds like it would be awesome for educational institutes."

Comments

And why exactly?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Why exactly would you want to run code ON the satellite? "run sensors, download data" That's pretty much the drill... The interesting code is what you run to analyze the data AFTER you get it...

Why? Massive destruction, of course!

[tchernobog]

Then again, you could hack into the main system, power on the thrusters, and ram into a military-grade satellite, changing its azimuth. In the ensuing madness, small splinters get sent across the Earth orbit at high speed, finally surrounding us by the Kessler syndrome we deserve, and cutting us out of space for a good while.

Ah, you can't take away one man's apocalyptic dream. :-)

Maybe I can cut out a job as a space-sweeper.

"Hopeful" language

[uzd4ce]

I wrote the following post, then just said Fuck It. Basically this article spews more shit than a shit-eater on the vomitron rollercoaster. Read if you like, i got tired and quit before finishing. Summary: people trying to scam $35k.

Just the language of the article makes it sound like a kind of pipe dream (or scam) -- nevermind why would i want to use sensors that someone else chose & put on there ... this wouldn't be a real experiment. My experiment would be making beer; I realize Sapporo already did this, but i want space-homebrew.

Instances where the language is really not making me think this is actually going to happen (and TFP is just more marketing):

"designing a satellite made almost entirely of off-the-shelf (or slightly modified) hobby-grade hardware, launching it quickly, and then using Kickstarter to give you a way to get directly involved."
  -- Very oversimplified... "it's all so quick and easy" is what it makes me think ... too easy

" ArduSat, as its name implies, will run on Arduino boards .... ArduSat will be packing.... Lots of sensors, probably 25 ..."
  -- Will run... ok, so it's not running yet. Will be packing ... ok, so it's not packing yet... "probably" ok... they haven't figured out how many???? It's mid-2012, and they're wanting to launch in 2013??? seriously???? Methinks they're running late for the train; er... rocket.

"NanoSatisfi is looking for Kickstarter funding to pay for just the launch of the satellite itself: the funding goal is $35,000. Thanks to some outside investment, it's able to cover the rest of the cost itself."
  -- So everything is covered, we just need to come up with a mere $35k? That's a lot of money for something that's still in the pipe dream phase, never mind the mysterious benefactor element. Who's the exudingly benevolent party?

"this will be a learning experience to see what works and what doesn't. The next generation of ArduSat will take all of this knowledge and put it to good use making a more capable and more reliable satellite."
  -- Translation: you're paying for our fuck-ups so we can build a better one that we'll make the real money off of; you won't be invited for that one

"If this Kickstarter goes bananas and NanoSatisfi runs out of room for people to get involved on ArduSat, no problem, it can just build and launch another ArduSat along with the first, jammed full of (say) fifty more Arduinos so that fifty more experiments can be run at the same time. Or it can launch five more ArduSats. Or ten more."
  -- Umm... where to start... yeah, we have soooooooo many slots to launch it's ridiculous; nevermind our delivery vehicles are soooo diverse that we can change payload size without any problem at all, ah, fuck this.

Re:"Hopeful" language

[qxcv]

This is A-grade linkbait, they're just spewing buzzwords and hoping certain news outlets (*cough* Hack-a-Day *cough* *cough*) will pick up on it and direct their readers to the Kickstarter page. Just looking through their writeup, it seems like they have absolutely no idea how they'll *actually process* the data; for example, they claim that they'll put a camera onboard, yet assuming that this camera uses one byte per-pixel channel and has a resolution of 160 * 180, they'll need (3 * 160 * 180)/1024KiB = 84KiB of memory to store a single frame and probably even more to process said frame. Yet the Arduino has only 1KiB of memory, and their downlink is unlikely to be able to transfer a whole frame in a reasonable amount of time (so no live video). That's only one of the big holes in their plan, here are some of the others:

• They plan to put a GPS onboard, but commercial GPS receivers shut off when they reach 60, 000ft and 999kt. The satellite will exceed both of these limits mere seconds after it leaves the launchpad
• They haven't explained *how* they plan to launch the satellite into space, or why it's costing them a mere $35, 000
• As pointed out above, it's unknown what advantage there is to running code *onboard* the craft when you could simply analyse the data on the ground
• None of their sensors are designed to operate in space. How will their pressure sensor work in a vacuum? Is their temperature sensor rated to work at extreme temperatures? It doesn't sound like it.

tl;dr parent is right and this is a giant load of bullshit.

Re:whats that code for free HBO??

[infonography]

A, B, A, B, right, left, right, left, down, down, up, up

Duh