Student-Made Satellite Goes Into Orbit

College Student writes "A Satellite built by aerospace students from 23 university groups successfully took off from Plesetsk, in northern Russia. From the article: 'A Russian booster rocket successfully carried a satellite designed by students into a low Earth orbit yesterday for the European Space Agency under a programme intended to help to inspire and train future aerospace workers.'"

Cal Poly was part of the launch

[Nf1nk]

http://littonlab.atl.calpoly.edu/ [calpoly.edu]
The article was notibly short on details, so here is a link to one of the satellites in the launch. This was an impressive feat for the schools involved and much was learned from the process.

Re:Cal Poly was part of the launch

[Nf1nk]

http://sseti.gte.tuwien.ac.at/express/mop/ [tuwien.ac.at] This is the SSETI Express team home page.

It's no joke

[Cerdic]

In the bit of undergraduate research that I've done, I've seen people forge data regularly out of laziness. Sometimes numbers were off from what was expected, but instead of redoing a run of the experiment, they just put in what they thought it should have been. The numbers are reasonable, but still, it's lying.

Anyone else have experience on this? I'm going to assume that graduate research is better with people who are more serious and care about what they do.

Something's gone horribly wrong

[freakcgi]

It fell silent after failing to separate from its booster properly http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/051028_sseti_ russiansat.html [space.com]

Re:Not to rain on their parade, but...

[CheshireCatCO]

Yes, but they didn't design and build the thing themselves, they're effectively just technicians on the project. (Before you take offense, let me note that CU-Boulder builds a lot of instruments, too, and I had friends who worked on some of them. They're getting really good experience, but they're not responsible for the entire project.)

There are other cases of student-designed/built/operated spacecraft, though: SNOE (Student Nitrous-Oxide Explorer) comes to mind. But NASA is *not* going to risk a Mars mission on students, though. It's too expensive.

Re:I was a bit worried...

[Mr2cents]

It wasn't SSETI, it was the other satellite Mozhayets-5 that failed to break free from the upper stage and is missing.

See here: http://space.com/missionlaunches/051028_sseti_russ iansat.html [space.com]

Picosatellites

[halftrack]

One of those 'picosatellites' is the NCUBE-2 (cue bad la^Hgamer puns.) Sadly, at the moment it seems like it's a dead duck. HAMs can help listen for it, information on the NCUBE homepage [ncube.no]. The other satellites are reported to be communicating with ground stations.

Re:Hey NASA, why not do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA does do things like this. I'm a sophmore electrical engineering student at Utah State University and I'm helping with USU entry in the 4th University Nanosatellite Competition http://ususat.usu.edu/ [usu.edu]. Selected universities design, build, and test small satellites and the most useful and best designed gets launched at the end.

Re:Something's gone horribly wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not right! You should read the linked story properly before posting - they are talking about one other s/c.

I was at the launch site and could hear SSETI Express on a radio during its first pass with my own ears. In addition, I'm in close contact with the mission operations center and can confirm that the satellite was not only transmitting but even that the whole launch, separation, safety-countdown, cubesat deplyoment, beacon transmission and the tracking and commanding of the S/C went smoothly and flawless.

Anyways, there were rumours that one of the other S/C didn't make it off the launcher. Those stories are unconfirmed - and the tracking of the space objects around the launcher adapter do not confirm the story either.

Best regards,
Sys_Joerg, SSETI Express System Engineering

Re:Unfortunetly....

[IO ERROR]

The satellite may well be in the Pacific Ocean. The ARRL [arrl.org] is reporting the satellite went silent.

The Student Space Exploration and Technology Initiative (SSETI) Express satellite, sent into orbit from Russia October 27, has gone silent. "We have not heard anything from Express on UHF since last night when the telemetry seemed to indicate a very negative power budget," Graham Shirville, G3VZV, said on the AMSAT BB as he was departing Russia following the launch. "If it does not recover then it will be a sad end to a wonderful mission." Shirville said ground controllers were going to attempt a blind command of the satellite this weekend in an effort to revive the satellite, which carries an Amateur Radio package and three CubeSat picosatellites. The spacecraft had been transmitting AX.25 telemetry at 9k6 bps on 437.250 MHz. Shortly after this week's launch, Shirville had reported the satellite was in nominal mode, producing 9k6 data bursts every 18 seconds. Plans call for the satellite will be turned into a single-channel amateur FM voice Mode U/S transponder after the transmitter serves initial telemetry duty.

Re:Cal Poly was part of the launch

[Anonymous Coward]

NO! Please DO NOT USE THIS ADDRESS!

please use: http://www.sseti.org/express [sseti.org]

The former address is an internal writing of the latter and *will* change during the next days as our servers are suffering from overload since three days...guess why ;-)