SuitSat Not Looking Good So Far 95
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.'
More informative links... (Score:5, Informative)
The suit itself: http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/articles/BauerSuits at/index.php [amsat.org]
People that heard suitsat - looks like it went offline about 1hr 15min into flight.
http://suitsat.org/ [suitsat.org]
SuitSat tracking (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not quite dead yet!!! (Score:4, Informative)
(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!
Still alive but weak (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two things... (Score:3, Informative)
"Invention is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration." -Thomas Edison
"Perhaps if Edison thought a little smarter he wouldn't sweat so much." - Tesla (supposedly)
I saw the space station this morning (Score:1, Informative)
In the good old days when drinking and driving was a recreational sport.We would make a wish everytime we threw a empty beer can out the window.I would suggest NASA do the same each time they throw debris from the station.It cant hurt.
Re:Equipment (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not going well? Not going at all. (Score:5, Informative)
Low earth orbit velocity is 7800m/s. The most likely, and worst way, to get hit by a paint fleck is to get hit by one in the same orbit but in the opposite direction, which would be a delta vee of 2*7800m/s.
Let's be really generous and say a paint fleck weighs 1g and hits the suitsat (say 100kg) dead on. By conservation of momentum, the suit's velocity will decrease from 7800m/s to... 7799.844 m/s.
In other words, it'll still be at 99.998% of it's original velocity. I won't bother calculating how little the fleck could have affected the spin, because it's not like the suit was spin stabilized to begin with. Spin fade was expected to begin with. The only significance of the fleck is that it would cause the suit to (slowly) depressurize, but more importantly possible trash the equipment if it was in the way.
My guess is that since the equipment wasn't really designed for this kind of orbital abuse: the nasty temperature shift between night and day just caused caused some circuitry to fail from thermal expansion. Or perhaps the suit leaked; the equipment wasn't designed to work in a hard vacuum.
Re:Another piece of junk (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Equipment (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone trying with their $12.00 radio shack scanner will be very dissapointed.
Ignorance is bliss (Score:4, Informative)
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 [www.rac.ca] 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/ [arrl.org], they just might notice little things.
It's amazing how stupid most of these people on
Audio of Suitsat (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.william-jacobs.com/personal/rnr.php?y=
Stability (Score:3, Informative)
There is no such thing as a spherically symetric omni antenna. I wonder if the suit has found a stable attitude which points a bad lobe straight down. Other lobes are attenuated by the atmosphere or don't point at the Earth.
Properly designed LEO satellites take into account plasma flow at orbital altitude.
SuitSat is still Operational (Score:2, Informative)
SuitSat Status 4 Feb 2005
---For Immediate Release---
Silver Spring, Maryland
4 February 2006 at 22:00 UTC
Paraphrasing Mark Twain....the demise of SuitSat-1 is high exaggerated!!
It is now nearly 24 hours since the successful deployment of the SuitSat-1
experiment. These past 24 hours have been a wild ride of
emotions...tremendous highs...deep lows when people reported no signals and
said SuitSat-1 was dead and now....some optimism.
It is absolutely clear that SuitSat-1 is alive. It was successfully turned
on by the ISS crew prior to deploy and the timing, micro-controller
functions and audio appear to be operating nominally. The prime issue
appears to be an extremely weak signal.
I have heard several recordings and have monitored two passes today. When
the signal is above the noise level, you can clearly hear partials of the
student voices, the station ID and the SSTV signal. One of the
complicating factors in reception is the very deep fades that occur due to
the spin of SuitSat.
Based on the information we know thus far, one can narrow down the issue to
the antenna, the feedline, the transmitter output power and/or any of the
connections in between. Through your help, we would like to narrow down
the issue further and also gather some internal telemetry from the
Suit. If the transmitter is running at full power, we would expect the
Suit to end operations in the next few days to a week. If it is not, then
it will operate much longer. Since we do not know how long this experiment
will last, we ask for those with powerful receive stations to listen for
Suitsat---especially during direct overhead passes when the Suit is closest
to your area. If you can record these passes and send the audio to us, it
would be most appreciated. We will continue to be optimistic that this
issue will right itself before the batteries are depleted. So please KEEP
LISTENING!
Based on what we have learned, we would like to provide the following
guidelines to save you time and facilitate gathering information.
1) You need as high a gain antenna as possible with mast mounted
pre-amps. An arrow is the minimal set...it provides very brief snipets of
the communications. HTs and scanners won't cut it.
2) I would not waste your time on passes below 40 degrees
elevation. SuitSat is too far from your station to receive a reliable
signal. We have found that closest approach provides several seconds of
SuitSat communication with 22 element yagis.
3) The "gold" we are looking for right now is the telemetry information
and how long the vehicle stays operational. So if you hear any of the
telemetry, please let us know.
We are also working to get the voice repeater set up on ISS to downlink
SuitSat audio on 437.80 in the event that the ISS Kenwood radio can receive
the SuitSat transmissions. The repeater may be operational as early as
mid-day Sunday. Please do NOT transmit on 145.99, voice or packet, until
we have confirmed that SuitSat is no longer transmitting. These
transmissions interfere with our ability to hear SuitSat.
While the transmission part of the SuitSat experiment has not been stellar,
SuitSat-1 has been tremendously successful in several areas. Some of these
successes include:
-We have captured the imagination of students and the general public
worldwide through this unique experiment
-The media attention to the SuitSat project represents one of the biggest
ever for amateur radio
-We have had well over 2 million internet hits on www.suitsat.org today
-Our student's creative artwork, signatures and voices have been carried in
space and are on-board the spacesuit---the students are now space travelers
as the Suit rotates and orbits the Earth
-Carr