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Girl Geeks Launch Picosatellite
Anonymous Coward writes "Girl Geeks Launch Picosatellite
Artemis, a team of
Girl Geeks at
the Santa Clara University have designed and built a pico-satellite. An
EE Times article
says the Santa Clara women spent
over 5000 hours designing and building the satellite. Ham radio operators
will be able to tune in and listen to the telemetry from the satellite
to be launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California.
The girls took the name of their team from Artemis, the Greek hunter
godesss of the moon."
I must applaud their choice of acronyms: "The Santa Clara Remote Extreme Environment Mechanism (SCREEM)".
Werd.
how about more ham news?
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
Sucks to be him?
I dunno, spending lots of time outnumbered by smart, geeky women sounds kind of fun. But then I've always worked well with women, and have had several women managers and co-workers.
I think it's great that's it was a multidisplinary team. On my two Aerospace engineering class projects ( 4 person business turboprop and experimental solar sail), it was all Aerospace undergrads, we fudged the EE and CS stuff. No women on our teams either, if I recall, you would have had to combine the classes of 88, 89 and 90 to get six women Aerospace undergrads.
George
For their senior project, these kids launched a freakin' satellite.
Much as I hate hardware (stupid evil sound card of doom sound cards, especially, at the moment), I'm pretty impressed.
"So, what'd you do last weekend?"
"Oh, we put our satellite, that we built because we wanted to, into orbit. You?"
I for one have always preferred the ease of Pico over vi when it comes to simple text editing. I am thrilled to discover that my chosen text editor now has satellite capability as well.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
I prefer the Gnotepad+ satellite. Sure, it may require an X Launch delivery system, which is resource intensive and reuires more modern hardware, but it sure is pretty, what with all the colored fonts and italics and all.
George
Many of your breadwinners in trenches are wasting their time posting to Slashdot while at the same time, the real trenches are the continuing 24 hour care of screaming children (+ cooking, washing, cleaning etc.). This labour (and its considerable cost if it were to be expressed in terms of money) is simply not factored in your trenches attitude.
:-)
:-)
Amen! and I'm a men!
As I said to my wife the other night... it's a team effort... she gets kind of upset (ninth month pregnant, etc.) and starts sorrowing about how she can't work and she feels useless and everything, but it's a team effort. She keeps the house and makes it a home, and I enable us to have the house. She feeds me and keeps me healthy, and I use that to keep us fed and sheltered.
She can 'tolerate' our three year old where I find myself getting angry when he's not doing what he is supposed to. She diffuses an arguement between a 3 year old and a 23 year old before I make an ass of myself. Somehow she manages to keep a good demeanor on almost no sleep and makes sacrifices for the family. I get my sleep because of it, and can work hard to bring home extra money to help the family.
The world will never be 100% equality, because men and women are different. Different strengths, different abilities (physically speaking), different ways of looking at things to solve problems.
So no, your 5'4" 98lb woman will never be a fireman (er.. person), but it's not sexist... she can't physically do the work. Simiarly a man will never be a true mother, nor have the abilities to become one (freakish medical science apart from this).
I lived in my house by myself for a few years... it was where I lived, but it wasn't quite a home... more a three-story computer lab. When she came into my life things changed...fast. And despite my dislike of having to squish things into smaller spaces, the house -- and myself -- are better for it. I now have a home and a family.
I see your point.
I looked all over the Artemis web page, and couldn't find much more on Duncan.
I'm guessing here, but I'm thinking the seven women designed and built the hardware, and Duncan did the software part, thus, the women didn't work much with Duncan, and they became the focus of the third party stories.
Maybe one of those eight people read slashdot, and they can illuminate.
George
And _I_ thought that the Artemis satellite would be a powerful smart space mine to protect the solar system from invaders.
;)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Why some much emphasis on the fact that they were female, when the technology is quite interesting on it's own?
Well, it's not like they're building a million of these things. Whether it fits in 8192 bytes or 128 Meg, doesn't really matter on a one-shot project being done for fun/experience.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ah, Linda Lovelace. No wait, she was famous for polishing rockets, not programming and launching them. Perhaps you're thinking of overbloated-overspecced-defense-department-program ming-language-from-hell Lovelace? No wait, that's not it, either. Even the thought of C++ Lovelace troubles me too much. C Lovelace. Yes, that has a nice ring to it. I think if I ever have a daughter, I will name her C. C Sloppy. See Sloppy run. Run, Sloppy, run!
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"The world will never be 100% equality, because men and women are different."
That's true to some extent, though I would say *people* are different. Some males may have a knack for nurturing and some females may do better as firefighters. There are 5'4" 98lb men, and 6'6" 250lb women, right?
People shouldn't be directed away from a profession due to their sex unless there is some objective reason it matters. If they're too short and weak to be a firefighter, fine, use that as the reason. To say *no* women can/should be firefighters, and *no* single men can/should be parents is what gets folks upset, there is no reason to use sex as the discriminating factor.
Let people find the direction that suits them without having statistical proof of unsuitability thrown in their face. We don't need strict roles for sexes, but rather job qualifications to determine if individuals, regardless of their demographics, are well enough suited to the task.
Heh, this should be moderated up as 'Fucking HILARIOUS'! This is the funniest post I've read here in 2 or 3 days!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
what a bollocks. Many of your breadwinners in trenches are wasting their time posting to Slashdot while at the same time, the real trenches are the continuing 24 hour care of screaming children (+ cooking, washing, cleaning etc.). This labour (and its considerable cost if it were to be expressed in terms of money) is simply not factored in your trenches attitude.
Ok... I've thought quite a bit about this, and I just can't figure out. Could you please explain this to me, Who is forcing you to have children? I just don't see it...
Personally I work full time (I'm a tech, if it don't break I ain't busy) so that my GF can develop her webdesign/hosting business along with the female half of another couple, the male half of which also works full time. I would expect the same of her if I was working on a business idea that I thought could get off the ground and needed her to support us for a few months. I don't see anything wrong with this, and I STILL can't figure out who's forcing people to have children...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
And then you get men that not only work a full day (and it's lunchtime for me, that's why I'm posting), and then spend all their time t home doing the cooking, cleaning, child caring, etc while the wife sits on her ass in front of her computer.
Geralizations and assumptions do nothing more than make you look stupid. And as for the above statement, that is the EXACT situation I'm in most of the time, so kiss off.
Luckily for me my GF loves to cook (she was going to be a chef but didn't like 12+ hour days) so I get GREAT meals, I do all the cleaning and work full time (more like play with 'puters all day). I love it, we have a great relationship. So it IS possible for it to work. Unless 1/2 of the couple is a jackass...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Last year, I was walking through Benson Memorial Center(read: The Place That Shoves Surprisingly Decent Slop Down Our Throats), and I saw a sign inviting us to go check out the Picosatellite.
Unfortunately, I saw the sign a few days too late. I had missed a major golden geek opportunity.
Santa Clara actually does have a damn cool engineering program--I know, I go there. My kudos to these very ambitious students, and those faculty who (I assume) helped them get their project into orbit.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
So it's an all female team? According to their home page they are a group of "six female undergraduate senior engineers". It's a little misleading, suggesting the team is made up of only these engineering students. The total number of students is seven. Look at the Team List. There is one guy: Duncan Laurie, self proffessed "God of Computer Engineering".
I'm all for women in engineering, there is plenty of room for more. However, let's be team players and all work together. I am discouraged whenever a same sex team accomplishes something.
Good luck to the group. I certainly had fun doing similar work in college.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Ummm... ok, I THOUGHT your first statement was a joke, and a damn funny one. Now I think your an insane biggot with no clue whatsoever and an IQ of around 75.
Have you ever bothered to even SPEAK to a female engineer? They are competent bastards! I've YET to see a Fem programmer or engineer make a serious mistake. They are VERY VERY good at what they do. And guess what, a lot of them do it without and sometimes inspite of parental or societal guidance. A good female friend of mine, despite her insane mother, is an excellent programmer and techie. As is my GF. You are just insane. And should I ever meet you I would be hard pressed not to maim you and leave you in a ditch to die to make sure your DNA was never propogated.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Who ever designed the embedded control system for this thing was obviously a novice. I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at "Rev. 1" and saw them actually using a BASIC Stamp 2! The BS2 is a toy. It's designed to interpret a language called PBASIC (even worse than real Basic), and it's very slow. The BS2 doesn't even have interrupts or support for negative numbers.
Thank goodness someone with some knowledge got to them and put a 68HC11 microcontroller in "Rev. 2"! That's a real controller, with real features. (Yes, you can even get C compilers for it.)
A comment for the "Does it run Linux?" people:
Many embedded controllers do not run any operating system at all. On reset, they just jump to the program people load into their memory. You don't need an operating system for most embedded devices. If you need multitasking, you can use timer-based interrupt vectors yourself to run routines, or you can use a "realtime executive" (very small multitasker) on them. This is why I sometimes laugh when I hear CompSci-types designing an embedded device to run Linux. Why do you need it? Build a standalone program, and save money on memory and processing power.
If you looked at the projected lifetime, I think the odds of space junk hitting it in the week or two that it's alive are pretty remote.
Of course, there's always a first time.
George
So what is the 2 meter frequency they intend to use....and the callsign too.
I'm going to get my EME array and blast that girrrrrly thing out of orbit!!!!!!!!! (just kidding).
Maybe most of you already knew that women are good at math and science, but there are still plenty of people, including plenty of women, who haven't quite caught on to that. I'm writing this from the a women's college, and I've met a startling number of women here who struggle through their math and laboratory requirements, and while they will never say that math and science aren't a "girl thing" still don't believe that the statement can hold true for them. Most women I see majoring in sciences tend to be drawn toward softer sciences, like biology and psychology, as well; there's still a relatively prevalent feeling that areas like engineering are pretty much the boys' domain. Being a "geek" as a girl (in junior high and high school, especially) is very strongly discouraged; there was a lot more pressure for me as a teenager to "get away from that computer and get a life" than I saw in any of the guys I knew.
I freely grant that we've come a long way from my mother's adventures as a chemistry major in the late 60's and early 70's; most women don't get asked "You mean you want to be a chemistry teacher?" or told by their guidance counselors that they have no chance and should maybe look into something that they can handle. This doesn't mean that girls are quite convinced that this can be their realm, too. So to speak.
I'd be really, really happy if a group of female undergraduates designing a satellite wasn't a really big deal, or at least wasn't a big deal primarily because they were women... because things like that happened everywhere. But they don't. The fact that the final team was not, in fact, completely female (replacing the woman who left, I suppose) and the way that this was ignored by the news article does certainly say something. Basically, it's reflecting a desire to get a story about "girls and science" out, because "girls and science" is still news. That's why it's good to hear about things like this... not everyone quite gets it yet.
Actually, normal spacecraft almost never get hit by space junk. The only incident I know of was when Challenger took a paint chip moving at God's own speed on its windshield. The windshield cracked so badly that it had to be replaced, and the crew was lucky to survive.
In general, any space vehicle that's hit with space junk is not going to survive it well.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Actually, normal spacecraft almost never get hit by space junk. The only incident I know of was when Challenger took a paint chip moving at God's own speed on its windshield. The windshield cracked so badly that it had to be replaced, and the crew was lucky to survive.
Tell me more. Did NASA have comprehensive glass coverage on the shuttle, and how much did their premiusm go up? Did the insurance company take their word on it, or did they want to see the damage? Did a glass shop fly up into orbit to replace it? Was the shuttle able to pass inspection as long as the crack wasn't in the pilot's line of site?
Thanks,
George
Notice how all the the girls have things they do in their "free time"; like hiking, dancing etc, while they guys apparantly don't? This is the fundamantal difference, one which I don't think will go away for quite a while - for many guys, computing/hacking/electronics etc IS what you do on your free time (and in school, at work, at night, while eating etc). Sure, there are exceptions (there always are) but this holds true for most... //Sasq (sasq@c64.org) [A.C. cause password forgotten :]
It helps to have that male breadwinner working at Micron or something so you can actually do stuff. This is definitely a phenomenum of the 21st century. Men winning the bread but instead of cleaning house, the women build stuff at home. They still depend on men for financial means but it's a progressive dependance.