Having two small children in elementary school, what they are learning is of course extremely important to me. Science is absolutely vital to our economy and future national competitiveness.
But it's how they are being taught that might be of even greater importance, according to a Space Review essay, "Student Satellites: Encouraging Trend or Sign of Panic?"
At the Space Review Jeff Foust reviews a new book about the first manned private craft to reach space: SpaceShipOne.
Wayne
Tyler recently uploaded this animated clip of a KySat cube exiting the Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD. Housed in the launch vehicle, the P-POD will carry KySat to orbit.
Wayne
As promised yesterday, here is a video of the deployment mechanism for the innovative CubeSat NanoSail-D. It's amazing how 10 square meters of sail can be packed into the space the size of three cubes.
[Update:] Dean Alhorn, the engineer in the video, wrote to say that "the actual sail and deployment mechanism is packed in the volume that is less that 2 cubes. The first cube is all electronics and batteries. The next two cubes [house] the sail, boom mechanism and some deployment electronics. There is room for 40 sq. meter of sail, but not enough volume for more boom length."
Thanks for the clarification!
Wayne
According to news released today, NASA appears to be in the process of developing "a university-based, student-led satellite development initiative" to build a student moon orbiter. NASA:
Under the [American Student Moon Orbiter] concept, teams would learn directly from NASA mentors as part of a diverse, nationwide, higher education initiative that enables students to design, build, launch, operate and own a small spacecraft and its payload. Students would acquire in-depth experience with satellite mission protocol and procedures, communications and project management. NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California and NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland are leading the ASMO initiative.
Wayne
[Cross-posted from the IdeaFestival] I enjoyed this quote from the recent article, "For Alien-Life Seekers, New Reason to Hope," regarding the results from a new sky survey:
Whether habitable or abominable, planets are inescapable. 'You make a star, you’re probably going to get planets,' said Seth Shostak, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. 'They’re like those knives that get thrown in for free when you order a Veg-o-matic.'
The idea that there might be other planets like ours orbiting distant stars is hardly new - exo-planet hunters have cataloged over 300 in the past dozen years - but the notion that Earth-sized planets might be fairly common is a more recent development. As one planetary theorist says in the article above, it's very suggestive that just as soon as astronomers were able to find low-mass planets, they found them. And as observational techniques are further refined, the detection of an exo-planet very similar in mass to ours now seems almost a matter of time.
Wayne
Wikipedia: planetary formation
Paul Gilster reports on the Dark Energy Survey, a new earth-based observatory that will try to make sense of the approximately 74 percent of the universe we don't understand, dark energy, which scientists believe is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the cosmos. Fully understanding the properties of dark energy may alter our current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics.
ESA has more on the lenses used in the camera that will conduct the survey.
Wayne
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has performed its first wet chemistry experiment on the collected Martian soil, returning data showing that it contains many nutrients. It might just be suitable for... asparagus?
Wayne
Tyler passed along the second of two picture of Earth from the CubeSat Cute 1.7 + APD II. It's orbiting altitude is roughly similar to the altitude that KySat will fly.
Thanks Tyler!
Wayne
Tyler uploaded this video of the antenna deployment using the KySat engineering model. Think of it as a kind of "proof of concept." The team is currently testing the cube and getting the flight model ready to go.
All the antennas are quarter wave monopole at their respective frequency. The shortest antenna - about 5 cm long - is for the S-Band up- and downlink. The 19cm UHF antenna is used for downlink, and the 50cm antenna - the longest - is used for uplink.
Wayne
Holding what must be one of the more interesting jobs around, the people who do the cool animation for various NASA videos are on the Web here. Their work on video of the Constellation and Orion vehicles can also be found at NASA. Hat tip: Rob Coppinger at Hyperbola
Wayne
Wired: Digging into the Martian arctic, the Phoenix Mars Lander has found water ice on Mars.
Wayne
The very latest Carnival of Space is available. Among the many stories you'll want to read is one on listening to gravity!
Wayne
Members of the KySat team conducted hammer tests of the cube yesterday on the campus of UK. As Tyler explains at the bottom of this post, collecting this data and comparing it with the known vibration profile of the rocket will tell the team whether any dampening needs to be added to protect the satellite during launch.
The "test pod," which simulates the P-POD system that will physically deploy the satellite, is pictured below right. The cube is inside.
The hammer tests are part of a complete testing regime that will ensure that the cube survives launch and carries out its educational mission once it is in the cold vacuum of space.
Wayne
Here is an artist's impression of the latest in a haul of planets from recent observations at the European Souther Observatory.
The image depicts a system of three "super-Earths" around the star HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor.
As detection techniques improve, the ability to potentially resolve exoplanets as small as Earth is becoming more likely, and, indeed, according to European astronomers about 45 new "Earth-like" planets have been uncovered by Harps, or the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher at the observatory in Chile. The new discoveries have the mass of three or four Earths.
Astronomers now believe that roughly thirty percent of the stars in the Milky Way may harbor such super-Earths, according to a New York Times article yesterday.
Scientific American has more.
Given the wealth of data being created by terrestrial observatories like Harps, space craft such as Kepler almost undoubtedly will find planets very similar in mass to our own within habitable orbits - orbits permitting the presence of liquid water - of their parent stars.
You and I are living in the Golden Age of planetary discovery.
Wayne
Competing on behalf of seven institutions, university students recently participated in an event sponsored by the Mars Society to test rover concepts in the Utah desert.
Teams were given four difficult tasks for the 2008 URC: two scientific analysis tasks and two engineering performance tasks. A Geology Task required teams to perform imaging in both the visible and infrared spectra, while a Soil Characterization Task involved measuring subsurface temperatures, water concentration levels, and pH levels. For both scientific analysis tasks, teams were given 35 minutes to collect data in the field with their rover followed by an additional 35 minutes to analyze the returns, and were then asked to deliver a 15-minute field briefing to the judges.
Perhaps the most sinister of challenges was the Construction Task, which required teams to secure a series of panels by tightening standard nuts and bolts. The target fasteners were placed between 15 and 75 centimeters above the ground and could be tilted forward or backward up to 45 degrees, making this difficult task even more overwhelming. In what ended up being the most dramatic and exciting event of the competition, the Emergency Navigation Task gave teams 35 minutes to deliver a small box of supplies to a distressed astronaut in the field, provided only with his last known coordinates.
Oregon State, the University of Nevada Reno and York University (Toronto, Ontario) finished one, two and three, respectively. The winner also won a trip to the 11th Annual Mars Society convention in August.
Wayne
GLAST, which will scan the heavens for high energy bursts, and perhaps help solve the mystery of dark matter, has successfully launched according to Wired. A nice graphic illustrating the electromagnetic spectrum accompanies the article.
From NASA:
After a 75-minute flight, the GLAST spacecraft was deployed into low Earth orbit. It will begin to transmit initial instrument data after about three weeks. The telescope will explore the most extreme environments in the universe, searching for signs of new laws of physics and investigating what composes mysterious dark matter. It will seek explanations for how black holes accelerate immense jets of material to nearly light speed, and look for clues to crack the mysteries behind powerful explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.
Wayne
The X-Prize Foundation has set the dates for the 2008 Lunar Lander Challenge, according to th blog Beyond 62. The challenge, almost won last year, is designed "to accelerate commercial technological developments supporting the birth of a new generation of Lunar Landers capable of ferrying payloads or humans back and forth between lunar orbit and the lunar surface."
The official release is here.
Wayne
Next Big Future lists the top ten near-term technologies that will significantly boost existing space capabilities. The technological list includes dramatically lowered access to space, faster travel to Mars, inflatable structures and electric solar sails. It's an interesting collection of technologies that are close to reality. Check it out.
Wayne
Courtesy of the Southgate Amateur Radio Club, here is a terrific picture taken of Earth by CubeSat Cute-1.7 + APD II, recently launched from India along with many other cubes.
The image is from an altitude of 620 kilometers. Tyler has said that the KySat cube will fly at roughly 650 kilometers in altitude, so the perspective is about the same.
It's thrilling to think that a satellite built by Kentucky students may join other satellites in orbit!
Wayne
The very latest Carnival of Space, this one with an emphasis on space economies and intersteller space, has been posted.
Wayne
Saying that "as long as nobody gets hurt, a decent explosion livens up any experiment," the Physics arXiv blog reports on the failed test of a potential new propulsion idea, Lorentz Actuated Orbit. Could tiny satellites be powered by the Earth's magnetic field?
This is a project of Mason Peck, who has also been working on modular reconfigurable space craft held together by magnetic flux pinning. CubeSats might be used to test these principles.
Wayne
Dr. Jim Lumpp, faculty adviser for Kentucky Space, was kind enough to offer an update on the status of the CubeSat on Tuesday.
Wayne
Wired: NASA is betting that employees who spend a year working outside the agency will bring innovation back to the agency when they return.
NASA's Innovative Partnerships Program gets a tip of the hat for doing something new. This could also be a way to help solve some of the next generation workforce issues at NASA. Sending young employees out could appeal to their need for stimulation and new challenges and coming back they might gain other leadership opportunities as a result of their new found experience. Older employees could get exposed to open source, Silicon Valley ways of thinking and latest and most up-to-date technology and practices being used out in industry and beyond. Plus the opportunity to work in fields where the workforce is younger will provide exposure to the talents, abilities and unique contributions next generation workers have to offer, a potential unexpected return on this investment
Organizations interested in hosting a NASA employee for up to a year should see this page.
Wayne
Mentioning roving laboratories and a Mars sample return mission, this European Space Agency video on the future of space exploration goes into some length on human exploration of Mars. There is, as the director of ESA suggests, no opposition between human and robotic exploration of the planet.
Wayne
When I first saw this video from the Delphi C3 team - thanks Tyler! - I thought of everyone on the KySpace CubeSat team. Here's to a similarly happy outcome when KySat flies!
Wayne
Is this material, uncovered when Phoenix's rockets cleared the material on top during landing, ice?
Image source: NASA/JPL/Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute
Wayne
Carnival of Space no. 56 is now out at the Lifeboat Foundation.
Wayne
It looks like ARCA, the Romanian entrant in the Google X-Prize Lunar Lander challenge, will make the first flight to space. Lofted to 18k by balloon, a mock up of the European Lunar Lander the team proposes to use will be taken the rest of the way to space by a booster. The team is looking to make the effort in the next three months.
Also newsworthy: four new entrants into the challenge have been announced.
Wayne
Space Prizes provides a list of Google X-Prize videos on YouTube that haven't shown up on the official X-Prize Foundation web site.
Wayne
For the very first time a spacecraft - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - has taken a picture of another spacecraft - Phoenix - as it descended to another planetary body. Think about that for a second!
Hat tip: Universe Today
Wayne
In case you weren't already following along, the Phoenix's Twitter page is climbing the Twitterholic rankings and currently is the 42 most popular according to Nature.
Wayne
The Phoenix Mars Lander, which will continue the study of the history of water on the planet and search for evidence of microbial life, touched down safely last evening at the northern pole of Mars. News and pictures are here.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/University of Arizona
Wayne
What's your space IQ? Referencing a 10 question quiz hosted elsewhere, New York Times science writer John Tierney has added three "extra credit" questions of his own, one of which is the title to this post. He promises to publish the most cogent argument - for or against - human space exploration in an upcoming TierneyLab, his regular "ideas in science" column in the Times.
Wayne
Because Titan's thick atmosphere burns up objects prior to impact, there are very few craters on the surface. Surface winds and erosion have tended to erode surface craters as well. But on Cassini's most recent flyby on May 12, the craft discovered only the fourth featured definitively identified as an impact crater. It is pictured above on the left, with another crater, discovered in 2005, shown on the right.
More on the discovery may be found here.
Wayne
Image credit: NASA/JPL
Want to be an astronaut? Applications are being accepted by ESA and NASA, and by Canada and Japan.
Wayne
According to the Space 2.0 blog, a space business plan competition for university students will be held in 2009.
The 8th Continent Project Business Plan Competition challenges students in business, engineering and science to collaborate in creating business ventures related to space, but with immediate application on Earth. Teams should consist primarily of graduate students, although undergraduate participation is welcome. Prizes for the winner include up to $50,000 in cash and in-kind services.
The competition is a project of the Colorado School of Mines 8th Continent Project, the "world’s most comprehensive effort to integrate space technology and resources into the global economy."
Here is the video pitch:
Wayne
According to the Oregon Space Grant Consortium, NASA will be conducting a webcast a portion of the Phoenix Lander mission for schools on Thursday, May 22 as the robot explorer, which will touch down on Mars on May 25, nears the planet. The events of the entry, descent and landing, and the path to Mars so far will be reviewed.
Phoenix's mission is to land at the Mars' north pole, dig into the icy soil looking for the chemical building blocks of life and study the history of water.
But first it much touch down safely on the Red Planet. Here is a very well done video combining animation with expert narration of the challenge getting Phoenix to the ground:
Wayne
The Space Elevator blog points out that the rulebook for the climb has been posted and the climb for the
power-beaming event has been increased to one kilometer.
If you're not familiar with the idea of a space elevator, originally proposed by science fiction Arthur C. Clarke, check this out.
Wayne
Image: Wikipedia
At the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla points to beautiful video of computer generated fly-overs of the Spirit and Opportunity landing sites composed from the actual topological data. There are four altogether - and the file sizes are substantial - but check out this 5 meg file featuring Victoria Crater (Quicktime) and a cameo of Opportunity descending into the crater. Emily also describes how Randy Kirk, planetary geologist working at the Unites States Geological Survey, has derived accurate topology for the virtual flyover:
Randy Kirk... specializes in the challenges of mapping the topography of planetary surfaces. His and his coworkers' methods, honed over many years, allow them to create topographic maps (and, nowadays, digital elevation models) of places on planets even when they don't have actual topographic data. They do it, most often, through a technique called photoclinometry, also known as shape-from-shading.
Wayne
With a great variety of space-related news, the very latest Carnival of Space is out. This week it's being hosted at Altair VI - so please, go check it out.
And if you're arriving here from Altair VI, welcome! Updates on the progress of Kentucky's CubeSat are here, postings from the recently concluded Kentucky Space 2008 conference, here.
Wayne
Universe Today: NASA is considering a manned mission to an asteroid that flew near Earth in 2000.
The asteroid mission would act as a "stepping stone" for future planetary missions to Mars and beyond. This three-month trek would provide vital technological, psychological and practical clues to what a manned deep space mission would face. Landing on an asteroid will be very difficult (due to the tiny influence of gravity on such a low-mass body), but it would provide an opportunity for astronauts to mine for water ice, use it for consumption and convert it into its component hydrogen and oxygen (for fuel and breathing). These tests would be essential before sending man on a long-term mission to Mars.
Wayne
[KySat Space readers: this is the final post from my live notes from the Kentucky Space Conference '08 session held last Wednesday in Lexington.]
Dr. Janet Lumpp, KySat faculty advisor from the University of Kentucky, is now up discussing student talent development - it's a issue critical to the success of Kentucky Space and has already come up in discussion a couple of times during the day.
Displaying a well-known quote from NASA administrator Mike Griffin, she says that the vision for space exploration will be carried out by kids in elementary and middle school now.
We're behind. Awarded engineering degrees have flat-lined. They're not keeping pace with population growth.
She points out that our kids are keeping up with the rest of the world through the fourth grade, but fall behind in science, engineering and math after that.
They must be reached at an early age in order to grab their attention before it drifts into other fields. For example, she wonders if the "CSI effect" might be attracting kids to forensics. Kentucky Space needs to fire kids imagination similarly.
She describes some principles for such a long term effort:
The first point is that Ky Space will be multi-generational effort.
It should inject enthusiasm by doing launch events - whether it's high altitude balloon events or doing suborbital launches. Bring students figuratively and literally as close to launches as possible.
She suggests that Kentucky Space can create "playground events" using handheld radios and antennas. She holds an antenna to demonstrate. Kids could submit cube commands that could be executed during playground fly-overs to deliver pictures and audio.
Dr. Lumpp points out that Prof. Bob Twiggs has created "PearlSats," which are strands of ping pong balls filled with candy, for example, that can be hoisted to a high altitude by balloon and "tested" afterward.
Perhaps those balls might be filled with seeds.
Displaying a picture of model rockets launching from a Crayola crayon box, she says that events might also be arranged that capture kids' imaginations using model rockets.
Or CanSats might be flown.
Continuing, she wonders if Kentucky Space might host design competitions. Balloons, sob-orbital and orbital mission design concepts could be solicited. Perhaps at this event in a year or two, a poster session could be held featuring mission concepts from elementary and middle schoolers.
All of these activities can help fill the talent pipeline.
Dr. Lumpp also describes the possibility of doing a standardized KY Space curricula. Much like the CATS testing done statewide, this curricula can also be used to assess progress in the space sciences. That curricula can used, for example, by schools or offered at the local YMCA. And of course, money is needed!
She pulls out some scale models that might be used to illustrate distances for a fifth grade curricula, and discusses how the concept of the extraordinary distances in space might be taught by walking a small foam ball across the stage to approximately thirty feet from a globe. That's the distance of the moon from the Earth.
For High Schools, the Doppler shift that can be taught using Kentucky Space CubeSats. Similarly, Energy Transfer/Transformation can be taught using space systems being used in orbit.
In all those cases, Dr. Lumpp discusses how that knowledge might be applied on a standard basis as part of a statewide space sciences curricula.
For impromptu educational events, she invites people to contact her. As Kris points out in response to a question, it's early - 90 percent of resources so far have been spent on the satellite. But clearly the educational goals of Kentucky Space participants, including the corporate partners, include developing space talent in the commonwealth of Kentucky.
Given a couple of elementary school children of my own, this was my favorite session of the conference.
Wayne
[Kentucky Space readers: the series of posts from a one-day conference held yesterday in Lexington, Kentucky are grouped under Kentucky Space Conference '08 in the category cloud on the blog. Image: Dr. Malphrus]
University of Kentucky student Michael Gailey, who is developing some of the testing facilities for the Kentucky cube, is up and is discussing spacecraft testing. Because there are no Jiffy Lubes in orbit, rigorous testing on the ground prior to launch is required, he jokes.
Threats in space include radiation, heat on the sun-side of Earth, and cold when in the shadow of the planet. Throw in the hard vacuum of space and the operating environment is hostile.
Michael displays a picture of the thermal vacuum facility being build at the University of Kentucky now. It will simulate the space environment - thermally cycling the cube from hot to cold and back again, and performing a "bakeout," which tests for any undesirable outgassing from the cube that might pose a threat to other spacecraft on the ride to space.
The shaker will be able to shake a 50 pound satellites on three axis in order to meet the NASA standard for durability while the craft is encased in the P-POD on the rocket.
A clean room is also being built ensure that no foreign components make their way into the cube. The room will meet "class 100" clean room standards.
Showing a picture of the room, Gailey says it's a great place to be if you have allergies.
Dr. Ben Malphrus, who is a Morehead State University faculty advisor for the ground portion of KySat, is up next.
The big project has been the development of the 21 meter dual-use space tracking antenna. It's 82 feet in height. And coming in at roughly 300,000 pounds, it is capable, as he says, of very wide range of motion in altitude and azimuth. The dish has also been designed to operate at K and KU bands to push the broadband envelope.
This antenna is capable of both radio astronomy and the support of satellite missions. It can provide long term monitoring campaigns, sky surveys (dynamic mapping of HI in the Milky Way) and the study of galactic supernova remnants.
Morehead State is very fortunate to have such a world class instrument, he says.
MSU has also obtained an anechoic chamber from Lockhead Martin, which it rebuilt. It simulates the EM environment of space.
Lastly, in development at Morehead is a Space Science Center and Research, Development and Educational Facility, which will permit control of the antenna and include a Digital Star Theater. This building is currently under construction and Dr. Malphrus treats everyone to some pictures - which also show, by the way, the radio antenna on a hill in the background. The building will be devoted exclusively to space sciences, and probably, he adds, wouldn't have been possible without an initiative such as those coming from Kentucky Space.
Here's the takeaway from these two speakers: The physical infrastructure to support Kentucky Space is being built now. The capacity to design, build, test and validate flight hardware in Kentucky is likewise being developed.
As Dr. Malphrus points out, "These are big results are coming from a very small cube."
Wayne
[Kentucky Space visitors: the series of posts from a one-day conference held yesterday in Lexington, Kentucky are grouped under Kentucky Space Conference '08 in the category cloud on the blog.]
Does Kentucky have a space brand? Not yet, but perhaps in the future it will.
Jeffrey Manber is a space entrepreneur speaking at Kentucky Space '08, a one-day conference focused on doing space in Kentucky.
Putting a spin on popular designations for the Internet, Kentucky, he says, is participating in Space 3.0, which along with SpacePort New Mexico and the Google X Prize, are pioneering a new way of doing space.
He contrasts these efforts to commercialize space with his work in an earlier era, and specifically his work with Payload Systems. He describes, for example, the difficulty of getting export licenses to do pharmaceutical research aboard "special Soviet space hardware located 200 miles from Moscow." The grammatical subterfuge was necessary because using spacecraft not made in the U.S.A., was unthinkable.
Success on that project was achieved in 1988, when a story came out on the front page of the New York Times that business was being done with the Soviets. The matter taught him an early and important lesson. Winning a policy battle in Washington means making sure the losing side knows they've lost. Get ahead of the story.
Manber also tells the story of PanAmSat, which put geostationary satellites in orbit. It meant going head to head with communications monopolies. It was another effort he was involved with, and one the government fought effort every step of the way - only governments do space, after all. To his astonishment the United States, which had a monopoly via Intelsat on international communications, didn't want competition!
The founder of PanAmSat eventually launched his satellite with no permission to actually use it.
That taught Manber a second important lesson - apologize later. West Germany, Great Britain and, finally, the U.S., worked with PanAmSat to break the international communications monopoly.
Manber emphasizes that because they were open to commercialization under Gorbachev, it was the Russians who actually led the world into the preceding era, which he dubs Space 2.0. The irony is that they believed in commercialization of space. And as president of MirCorp, which followed his stint at Payload Systems, he helped the Russians, adding "If you wanted to work with the socialists, you worked with NASA. If you wanted to work with the capitalists, you worked with the Soviets."
He recounts Pespi-Cola wanting to put its iconic brand in space to take a picture of it with the Earth in the background for its annual report. Again, NASA was opposed. "NASA didn't know stock options."
Citing another example of bureaucratic inertia, Manber says it took three months for the State Department to decide who would press the launch button for Sea Launch, which used Norwegian, Russian and Ukrainian equipment. Eventually the solution was for the American and Soviet personal to alternate languages during the count down!
Again, he emphasizes that it was the Russians who embraced space capitalism in the 1990's.
The point is that this hard-won effort to decentralize who gets to do space will make efforts like Kentucky Space attractive and doable.
"Attractive," because sound business principles can apply. The commercial industry with capital being put at risk will be serious about that capital. At Virgin Galactic, he says, marketers are selling tickets. If, hearkening back to the earlier days of commercial space business, old space business practices had been applied to aviation, transatlantic flights would cost millions, there would be only five flights a week and those flights would carry just a handful of passengers.
What's more, all the economic studies would "prove" that the market couldn't be expanded.
There is an opportunity with Kentucky Space. "We decide when and where to fly." Because Kentucky is not traditionally associate with space, there is great freedom in that.
Throwing out some possibilities, he says that perhaps a standardized bus could be used for high altitude balloons. Perhaps that bus could be associated with Kentucky Space.
Put enough of these successes together, and "you get a brand."
Saying that he met last week with Chinese space officials, Manber concludes by saying that he told those officials that "Kentucky might want to work with you," that it was interested in collaborative educational opportunities.
Having provided ample evidence from his own career, he rhetorically asks, "Why wait?"
Wayne
Daniel Erb, who who started at Murray State University as an undergraduate on the project, has continued working on the project to this day. He's up now.
He displays a picture of the guts of the cube, showing the assembled engineering model. The technology developed for the bus of KySat-1 will be leveraged for other applications. Among the other pieces, the bus includes solar arrays, antennas, and payload. Daniel says that there has been an emphasis on COTS, or off-the-shelf components.
So what is the mission?
Education and workforce development are two primary goals of Kentucky Space. It should be accessible to all grade levels. The technology should be reusable and extensible.
There has been a real emphasis on ensuring that students want to use the satellite, and to make sure that it can be managed well.
The concept of operations emphasize simplicity. Kids need to be able to go onto the playground and listen to the satellite - with simple methods such as Morse code telemetry, students can get useful information. In addition, audio playback and photo capture will be possible.
In advanced mode, the cube will be able to upload and download data. Digipeating can be done. Amateur radio enthusiasts will be happy.
As of now, the engineering model is complete and testing will begin very soon. This is to make sure that the delivered satellite does not harm other payloads on whatever provider launches the cube.
In about a month, NASA will be coming to UK to look over the project. The team is hoping for a fourth quarter launch. Launch plus two weeks will see the beginning of public outreach.
Wayne
Tyler is up again following lunch to introduce the audience to CubeSats and says he'll offer a brief history, a subsystems description and information about recent launches.
The CubeSat is the result of the work of Professor Bob Twiggs and Dr. Jordi Puig-Suari, who set out to design an interface and launch system around which individual satellites can be built.
Holding up a CubeSat displaying an image of a Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD, he explains how the standards satellite cube fits into the P-POD for the trip to space. These "secondary payloads" are sent up with more expensive satellites. NASA realizes the potential of these pico-satellites and has its own program.
Since 2003, several launches have occurred - from the Eurockot to the SSETI Express to the two DNEPR rocket launches (converted Russian ICBMs), to GeneSat to a launch just last month from India that sent a record number of cubes to space.
As Tyler emphasizes, these cubes are increasingly used for very serious research.
The cube use solar panels to collect the sun's energy and use batteries to store it. Batteries have short life spans. Command and data handling provide the "brains of the cube." It gathers data, stores it, and is typcially computer controlled.
Communications radios send the radio to a ground station, which in the case of KySat, will be in Morehead State University. More on that later.
Payloads have imaging, scientific, educational, data transfer and information missions. While originally, there was a lot of concern over the scope of missions, now it's widely understood that cubes can have a very wide range of missions.
For example, he says the Delfi C-3 will do thin film solar cell experiments on behalf of Dutch institutions. That project has taken CubeSat engineering to a new level. Because it has no batteries, the Delfi cube is in continuous operation. Its designers have also provided a way for the public to collect data from the cube. The deployable solar panels on four faces of the cube are a terrific engineering accomplishment.
He discusses the SEEDS, COMPASS-1, Cute-1.7 and APD II cubes.
About 40 universities in 13 countries are making CubeSats.
In response to a question, he says that a handheld antenna and radio will enable Kentucky students to interpret the Morse dots and dashes from the satellite. It will be one way for Kentucky elementary students to participate.
Wayne
Today is the annual KySat conference. I'll be blogging and recording some digital audio in Lexington. Posts will follow.
Wayne
How would you like to have your name on board the craft that discovers the first Earth-sized exoplanet? Now you can. NASA has announced an opportunity for anyone to submit their name to be burned on a DVD that will accompany Kepler, scheduled for a February, 2009 launch.
The Name in Space DVD will be mounted on the exterior of the spacecraft in November 2008. A video of the DVD being mounted on the spacecraft will be taken and posted on the Kepler mission Web site prior to the spacecraft being shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in December of this year. A copy of the DVD with all of the names and messages will be given to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, Washington.
Wayne
Image credit: NASA
At the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla points to a brand new imaging site, the CRISM Mars imaging site. CRISM - the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars - uses the spectrum of reflected sunlight to determine the mineralogy of the surface, a technique called reflectance spectroscopy.
It's an important technique because some minerals will only form in the presence of water.
The interactive map is here.
Wayne
