CubeSat Launch Visible Around U.S. East Coast Tonight 34
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Brad Lendon reports at CNN that 29 satellites, the most ever launched at one time, will be aboard a single Minotaur I rocket scheduled to lift off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Tuesday night at 7:30 pm. The main payload will be the Air Force's Space Test Program Satellite-3, plus 28 tiny satellites called CubeSats about 4 inches on each side, weighing about 3 pounds and with a volume of about a quart. The cubesats will include Ho`oponopono-2 from the University of Hawaii to continue a long-existing radar calibration service for the 80 plus C-band radar tracking stations distributed around the world. It will also have CAPE-2 from the Cajun Advanced Picosatellite Experiment, to give students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette the opportunity to research, design, develop, and maintain a low earth orbiting satellite, and SwampSat from the University of Florida to advance the TRL (Technology Readiness Level) of CMGs (Control Moment Gyroscopes) appropriate for smallsats. Among the CubeSats is the TJ3Sat, the first satellite made by high-schoolers to go into space, built by the students of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. It will give students and other amateur radio users the opportunity to send and receive data from the satellite. Approved text strings will be transmitted to the satellite, and the resulting voice interpretation will be relayed back to Earth over an amateur radio frequency using the onboard Stensat radio. Orbital says the 29 satellites should achieve orbit in a little less than 12½ minutes after the rocket ignites. NASA says the launch may be visible from northern Florida to southern Canada and as far west as Indiana. Live coverage of the launch is available via UStream beginning at 6:30 p.m. EST on launch day."
Technical Difficulties (Score:2)
As of 18:46 EST they are at 1 hour and holding. Due to a problem with a downrange telemetry site.
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Countdown running again. T - 56 Minutes.
15 degrees of separation (Score:3)
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A Bud? Why not have a beer instead? (Unless you're talking about smoking bud, but then you wouldn't have capitalised it...)
Re:15 degrees of separation (Score:4, Funny)
Bud as in friend...
Re:15 degrees of separation (Score:5, Funny)
That only makes it weirder - he plans to watch for a satellite launch while murdering his friend?!?!?!?
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I saw it from NH. I thought it was an airliner at first until the trajectory made it obvious then it flamed out. Considering I'm over 400 miles away the view wasn't bad. I was down there today and had I remembered the launch I'd have stayed one more day.
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...or like 2 hours after :/
Quart??? (Score:2)
I think TFS meant "litre"...
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I think TFS meant "litre"...
The cubes are 10 cm per side. So they could either say "about a quart" or "exactly a liter", and they chose the former.
Good luck to all! (Score:4, Funny)
> The main payload will be the Air Force's Space Test Program Satellite-3, plus
> 28 tiny satellites called CubeSats about 4 inches on each side
Mission Director: Orbit achieved. Launch the Air Force satellite!
Operator: Launched...and away, sir.
Mission Director: Release the CubeSats!
Operator: Releasing...all launched.
Mission Director: How are they doing?
Operator: All 28 read nominal.
Mission Director: Good. I...
Operator: Oop. One just went offline.. Wait, another just did, too. And another.
Mission Director: What the Hell...?
Operator: Another...and another! Every two seconds, one drops offline. They read a sudden temperature spike, then nothing. OH, that's it, all 28 are gone.
Air Force Guy: That sux for you. My satellite just completed its 28 tests with flying colors.
Looked like a little red dot from DC. (Score:1)
Still, pretty neat. Nothing as cool as the ICBM launches I used to support... even tho the thing is a re-purposed ICBM itself.
Was easily visible from near Toronto, Canada (Score:1)
Watched without binoculars. Appeared as a red dot rising at a 45 degree angle from the SSE heading E and could see a tiny trail. Pretty damned cool!
Re: Was easily visible from near Toronto, Canada (Score:1)
Had my sons out there to watch it. Between watching the video of the pad at launch and then being able to look up and see it rising above the house 7 seconds later they were really excited. Hoping the enthusiasm sticks!
Saw it with my kids from southern Ontario (Score:2)
Rocket sighted from New Jersey (Score:4, Interesting)
From a distance of roughly 80 miles from Wallops Island, the light was a visible circle (not a mere point-source) and strongly resembled the somewhat faint orange glow of a lit cigarette in a darkened room. From this vantage point, it did not shrink to a point until nearly 2 to 2.5 minutes after my first sighting
While the rocket was on its way, It was really nice to be talking to a friend on the phone who was viewing the live webcast on his computer. This gave me basically realtime intel on when each engine stage was shut down and the next one was ignited -- I could actually see the glow temporarily darken, then brighten again several seconds later. All in all, a very enjoyable experience despite my inability to be any closer to the launch site.
I'm extremely impressed that it was clearly visible from Toronto, eh!
Just heard the sat (Score:1)
More exact, less "About" if you use metric ;-) (Score:2)
"about 4 inches on each side, weighing about 3 pounds and with a volume of about a quart."
According to the specification [cubesat.org] linked from the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], you can offer more exact measurements in metric:
-The CubeSat shall be 100mm +/- 0.1 mm wide (X and Y dimensions)
- The CubeSat shall be 113.5mm +/- 0.1 mm wide (Z dimension)
- Each single CubeSat shall not exceed 1.33kg mass
Borg? (Score:2)