Make Your Own Sputnik

An anonymous reader writes "What better way of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik than by making one of your own. The BBC says that you can build your own Sputnik satellite from stuff lying around the house. The BBC quotes an electronics hobbyist: "Technology now is way ahead of what was available in 1957, and making your own fully functional Sputnik would now be very simple indeed. I wouldn't be surprised if you could build one in a container smaller than a matchbox, weighing about as much as a wristwatch. The components, including a transmitter, battery and the sensors you'd need would probably cost less than 50 pounds [about 100 US dollars]. It really shouldn't be a problem to build and program the whole thing in under a day." Unfortunately, the BBC article doesn't go into technical details." And of course, actually getting it up into orbit might take a little more work.

Re:Didn't we find out...

[Lumpy]

Exactly and changing the "beep" depending on temperature was not "programming" but how temperature worked on resistors to the timing circuit. Sputnik was 100% analog.

Re:Didn't we find out...

[the bluebrain]

1) Accelerate to approx. 35 times the speed of sound
2) Release (preferably in an upward direction)

Sheesh. Jules Verne already knew that. ;)

Re:Besides imagining a beowulf cluster of those...

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk to the folks at the Civilian Space eXploration Team. They put an amateur rocket in space (not orbit, though) a few years back.

See:
http://the-rocketman.com/CSXT/default.asp [the-rocketman.com]
http://www.ddeville.com/derek/CSXT.htm [ddeville.com]

Indeed...

[Gibbs-Duhem]

Some MIT hackers did just that. It's beeping instead of transmitting, but ya know =)

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2007/sputnik/ [mit.edu]

Getting it in orbit may not be so hard

[enaiel]

Wasn't there a Dutch dude who got his amateur transponder [observations.biz] launched as a secondary payload on an Indian PSLV rocket. Quite possibly there are more rockets with spare lifting capacity that might launch your homebrewed Sputnik. Might be worth the good publicity for them.

Electronics vs. Radiation in space

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

The BBC quotes an electronics hobbyist: "Technology now is way ahead of what was available in 1957, and making your own fully functional Sputnik would now be very simple indeed. I wouldn't be surprised if you could build one in a container smaller than a matchbox, weighing about as much as a wristwatch. The components, including a transmitter, battery and the sensors you'd need would probably cost less than 50 pounds [about 100 US dollars]. It really shouldn't be a problem to build and program the whole thing in under a day."

Oh, that old meme.

Trivia: What is the probability that off-the-shelf microelectronics (like wireless routers) will work in space? Answer: Roughly zero.

Why? Look at the information starting at page 23 on this document: Spacecraft Charging and Hazards to Electronics in Space [nyud.net]:

3. Radiation Effects on Spacecraft Electronics

The radiation sources discussed are hazardous to electronics since energetic particles can deposit energy inside microelectronic circuitry and disrupt their proper operation. Energy deposition in electronics is measured in rads(M) where M is a specific material being considered (1 rad = 100 ergs/gm). Energy deposition can be in the form of ionization or atomic displacements, which can permanently damage electronics, or it can be in the form of single events, which can cause transient or permanent damages depending on the severity of the event.

NASA doesn't ship Xeon processors into space, not because of budget cuts, but because they don't work reliably (if at all) in space.