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Space Science

PicoSats And CanSats And NEAR, Oh My 66

Posted by michael from the space-junk dept.
Snot Locker writes "As a followup to a SlashDot article posted last February, one of the picosats launched by students last year is still alive and well. Here is the article. What is even cooler is the link therein to the story on Coke-can satellites launched with amateur rockets!! My favorite CanSat story is at the end of the article where the prof caught the can before it landed." And we have the sad duty of reporting that NEAR won't be flying again after all. There's a great quote from one of the scientists about NEAR's current fuel level.
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PicoSats and CanSats and NEAR, oh my More

PicoSats and CanSats and NEAR, oh my

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  • Re:hmm (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My girlfriend got me an optical intellimouse for valentine's day. She didn't know what was cool about them, she just overheard me say that I was thinking about getting one. When I showed her how there was no ball underneath, she didn't believe me and said there has to be one under there somewhere. So I lifted up her shirt and ran it along her boob. She was impressed that the cursor moved. Microsoft should adopt this a tagline for this mouse. "Even works on boobs!"
  • The next satilites/probes whe send to mars should be built in a NEAR - beer can.

    Better yet launch a hundred out of a long range -relay missle from orbit.

    Leave a few cans full to confuse the martians long enough for a few pics to get sent back.

    -Cyril
  • CanSat should not be called a satellite by any stretch of the imagination. What they are doing is interesting, but not really any more so than the balloon experiments people have been doing for years.

    If you are REALLY going to launch a satellite, why are you worried about US laws? You want to do it from some place near the equator anyhow (This is why the ESA uses Kourou, rather than some European site). Do it from a ship, and don't worry about US law.

    SlashSat would be a waste. If you are interested in getting something interesting into space, hook up with an existing group. This stuff isn't easy. You can't "let the compiler do the debuggin" like all of you programmers are used to.

    With AO-40 hobbling along, AMSAT (ham radio satellite group) will have to do some real soul-searching about their future. That thing was so expensive, and now it doesn't work. Personally, I'd like to see more, smaller satellites. I'd also suggest a limited lifetime, in order to keep too much junk from accumulating in orbit.

    I'd like to have a group of LEO ham satellites in orbit, that any any time at least one will be available. There should be voice & data operation, but with more of a concentration on data as time goes by. New modes & methods should be developed for medium-speed (9600-19200 kbps), high reliability, low cost digital modes.

    The loss or impairment of a single satellite shouldn't have the affect that the dead AO-40 does, now.
  • Hail Eris. :)
  • Dude, it's University of Arizona, not "Arazona". Don't worry, it's cool. Probably a typo.
  • I believe it pairs up one to one with matter in some sort of mutually assured destruction scheme, am I wrong?

    Yes, you are wrong.

    --

  • There is nothing "mutually assured" about the destruction. When a particle and its anti-particle collide they do annihilate each other and release energy. But there is no guarantee that a particular anti-particle will ever be annihilated.

    --
  • You're right. There are steps to be taken before going all-out.
  • But will CanSats really survive in space? 15,000 feet isn't all that high, and there has to be some problems associated with going from 15,000 feet to 150,000 feet. Granted, there might be good research that can stem from this (atmosphere studies, wind speeds, directions, etc.) but in all fairness, there doesn't seem to be a real, true purpose to all this.

    Don't get me wrong, I think it's great (read: I want one!) But for purposes other than research, it can't do much. Rockets also are somewhat expensive to build and launch, especially those that reach 15,000 feet.

    But all in all, it's a great project!

  • "And the Japanese beat our socks off." Their CanSats talked to each other and sent pictures from digital cameras that toggled around. One CanSat even had a global positioning system receiver that was so good at detecting the satellite's location that the students went out to meet it. "Their professor grabbed the CanSat before it hit the ground," Twiggs says.

  • instead of NEAR
  • I know NASA's new motto...
    No you don't. It's "faster, better, cheaper" [cnn.com].
    --
    Patrick Doyle
  • My science teacher in highschool drove us mad with his hairbrained insistence that kilograms were measures of mass, not weight. But they're the same thing! It wasn't until several weeks later that we finally grasped the difference.

    I don't know about pounds tho. The use of the unit foot-pound for a measure of torque and the use of pounds of thrust to measure jet engines implies that pounds is a measure of force, which is weight, not mass.
  • What I think if unfair is the fact that only select few are allowed to do this.

    Do you mean launch bigger rockets .... check out Tripoli [tripoli.org] find a local group and bowl on down. The Arliss boosters are Ms so you need to work your way up to a level 3 confirmation if you want to do an exact cansat type flight but you could do close enough off of a minimum diameter K. Arliss itself maay start happening in other places - there's been some mention of expanding it across the US so that school kids all over could get a chance to build a payload

  • I think Andover should spring for the $50K to launch a SlashSat, complete with a compact flash card containing the goatse.cx image.

    -Vercingetorix
  • those 'two mysterious depressions, each the size of a footprint' aren't even footprint shaped but are irregular as all hell... but I love how down the articles the heading becomes Mysterious 'footprints'.

    I have a ditch in my backyard 'the size of a T-Rex footprint'... I should write to CNN about my sighting...

  • why use explosives when a rock (or any hard object) will do?

    A 'rock' would require a direct hit with a fairly high relative velocity to damage a hostile satellite. And to hit a hostile satellite at those velocities would require a fairly sophisticated guidance system.

    But a small satellite with a shrapnel warhead would only have to come close at much lower velocities, which means a smaller, simplier guidance system.

  • can you show some relvent data as to back this up?

    To back what up? That the US is overly dependent on spy satellites for enemy intelligence? That if an enemy can disable those spy sats with cheap picosats loaded with exposive warheads (a.k.a., ASATs [fas.org]), then US forces are essentially blind? That finally someone in the Airfarce was smart enough to figure it out?

  • Well, This was reported incorrectly. These aren't amature rockets, they're High Power rockets. The difference is like the one between hackers and crackers. Anyone outside the community can't tell/ doesn't care about the difference.
    High power rockets use commercially available motors that are certified by a governing body. Amature rockets use motors designed by the person launching the rocket and require a lot more knowledge and money (not to mention time) to launch safely. It's a very expensive hobby whereas I could afford to do High Power rocketry while I had my forst job working 8 hours a week at Taco John's
    High power rockets generally don't go much higher than this, and amature rockets are much more expensive and involved (high explosives certification, etc.).
    I can't really see a college using amature rockets as a mandatory part of the curriculum.
  • Just to make it clear, antimatter does have positive mass. Negative mass would mean negative energy. One of the interpretations of quantum mechanics is that the universe is chokfull of negative energy matter and when a particle is raised to positive energy, the hole it leaves in the negative continuum is its antiparticle.

  • I can see the headlines now...

    Fuel Miscalculation Leads to Disaster
    NEAR scientists burned too much fuel on the NEAR space probe, causing it to form a black hole and suck up Eros, the other 20-ish moons of Jupiter, and then Jupiter itself in a freak accident...

  • 1) XFL is kind of cool, once they figure out a better way to follow the action. Amazing concept, actually paying professional athletes based on their performance.

    2) There is huge difference between bottle rockets and something that can go a couple of thousand feet in the air carrying a payload with controlled descent. Although I don't think these kinds of rules should be imposed, I can see how someone can try to justify them. What I think if unfair is the fact that only select few are allowed to do this.
  • Aren't all of these MircoSats just making near earth orbit more dangerous? Maybe they orbit at different altitudes or something but, this seems really dangerous for useful things like com sats, current and future space stations, space shuttle missions etc...

    just my 0.02 $US
  • If they're on minus someone up there must have really wanted the mission to succeed.
  • Here we go guys... with all the articles lately about satellites, if we can scrape up $50,000 from slashdot users, we could launch SlashSAT into LEO (Low Earth Orbit).

    What purpose would SlashSAT have? Perhaps we could allow people to upload code to the sat, where the sat would compile and return the executibles... that would be *neat*. Or, perhaps the sat could send images of earth down to a slashbox on *slash* sites.

    Some of us are amateur radio operators, so we have the necessary skills and equipment to communicate with the satellite.

    Anybody have enough ambition to make it happen?

    regards

  • pico satellites, a threat? bah! vi !!!

    :q!

  • "We have no fuel on board, plus or minus 8 kilograms," said one NEAR scientist.

    Here's hoping for minus 8 kilograms. I hear those antimatter drives get even better mileage than a Honda. ;-)

  • From my understanding of physics we have created anti-matter and are familiar with the laws of it. I believe it pairs up one to one with matter in some sort of mutually assured destruction scheme, am I wrong ?
  • ...worked on this Satellite when he was at NASA. Today he was telling a story about the project and then started telling us the story about amazing it was that this thing landed on the surface of the asteroid.
  • "Imagine trying to talk to a 3-inch satellite that is traveling 17,000 miles per hour! It's an amazing feat!" Cutler says. The Aerospace picosats "may have been the smallest functioning spacecraft ever launched," he adds. That seems rather exciting and we'd surely not think of picosats as waste anymore. Slashdot readers were worried about space garbage when a similar article appeared 2-3 days back. Ofcourse that article talked of sending ashes of the dead etc. to space. But this surely looks like a better use and at $ 50,000 people would definately not think of some silly uses as sending locks of hair of the beloved etc , Valentine festivals apart.
  • can you show some relvent data as to back this up?


    Fight censors!
  • 23.5?

    Oh no!

    Thats half of 47!

    Any one get that?


    Fight censors!
  • The "cansat" is a pretty cool use of technology and engineering to get a small package of instruments, but what you've got in the end is still just a telemetry package and not a satellite. They only launched to 15,000 feet. Hell, by that definition I'm a satellite every time I go skydiving! Of course, the guy's over at LDRS [ldrs20.org] would probably be happy with a 15k "satellite" designation!
  • This remeinds me of an article I readawhile ago , might have been on /.
    any ways, this guy was going to put constellation of G4 cubes (that's right the apple "super computers") into orbit with modified AirPort
    and in doing so create a global wireless network,
    or some shit like that. Wonder how he's doing
    Anyways, Pico-sats are cool because they offer a low
    cost way for scientists to put useful instruments
    in orbit.

    C:\
    C:\Dos
    C:\dos\run
  • Yea.... but besides holding the infamous picture what would it do? Maybe we could get it to piggyback a signal onto the hubble signal. I'd probably pay to see NASA release a statement reguarding a massive space penguin that appeared to be eating the Crab Nebula.
    This has been another useless post from....
  • "We have no fuel on board, plus or minus 8 kilograms."

    And ideal for neologizing:

    "The President has no IQ, plus or minus 90 points."

    "Alex Rodriguez is destitute, plus or minus $0.25B"

    "Windows is not an operating system, plus or minus DOS."

    --Blair
  • Arliss has been doing this for years now. I happened to be able to accompany a middle school [jcsw.com] to Black Rock, Nevada to do this in the summer of '99. The University Of Arazona was there, as well as 2 groups from Japan (Tokyo Institute of Technology and University Of Tokyo if I remember correctly).

    The ARLISS group sent up three payloads, two temperature sensors (one a cricket chirp type sensor, one a radio wave signal back to a laptop hooked up to antennae) and a digital video camera. When a coke can is 30,000 ft above you, it's a tad hard to point the antenna's in the right direction, so we didn't have much luck. Our (as well as UOA's) focus was on sensors (I believe UOA had pressure sensors and velocity sensors in their cansats)

    The Japanese teams worked on mobilization. They had a 2-can sat that was tethered together and climbed up and down the tether, keeping track of how many times it had climbed and descended.

    All in all a good time was had by all. Being one of the two oldest kids on the trip was fun (no responsibilities of an adult, not doing kiddie stuff either... I ended up getting the dummy terminal up on the laptop though, that was fun). Besides, there was a planet of the apes marathon on the hotel TV... how much better could it get?

  • Since when did that stop anyone? I mean, c'mon, didn't we all used to build rocket launchers in the woods, even though it was a fire hazard, trying to clear the treetops and parachute down to the lake?

    Nope?

    Um, ok, then you all must be nice law-abiding drones. Go back to watching the XFL ...

  • From the article: Those and other NEAR pictures should keep astronomers busy for awhile. Some suggest unknown forces breaking up boulders, moving debris into flat crater pool and creating unidentifiable depressions the size of hand and footprints.


    Gee, maybe people were there millions of years ago! You know...our ancestors!


    Ah, the media flexing its power of persuasion....

  • Three years ago, you could have gotten about $20 million in venture capital funding for that.
  • I know NASA's new motto.. but come on.. hiring freshmen and using coke cans? Couldn't they at least use a tang can for nostalogia? ;)

  • the point is to get the experience of launching cheaply - it costs ~$400 (the AP cost) to put 3 cansats up and for that 3 university or school teams get to run their airframe thru the G forces of putting it up there and test their telemetry in a real-world environment - weather baloons are MORE expensive, less fun, harder to recover (they drift for miles on their way up) and don't provide the G shock on launch and deployment
  • Launching a rocket to 15,000 ft. is not terribly expensive. You can hit that for around $150 using commercially available high-power rockets.

    -Vercingetorix
  • actually, he meant to say 'pounds.' ;) Actually, 8 pounds of fuel would be quite a lot with gravity on Eros being what it is.
  • Special licensing is required when launching rockets with the higher engine ratings. I'm sure that guidance systems are also allowable through those licenses.
  • "... no fuel, plus or minus 8 kilograms"

    NASA hasn't wasted any money on failed Mars expeditions, plus or minus several billion dollars...

  • Back when I was considering getting into model rockets, I remember reading that it was against US law to put any sort of guidance or guided payloads on amateur rockets. I know foreign spies have actually been arrested trying to infiltrate American rocket launching societies. So the question is how the hell did these guys get around the rules or did I just misread all those warnings?
  • Mir's coming down any day now.

  • from the article:

    Radiation effects cause "upsets" that are like computer crashes, but OPAL can reset itself. Over time, though, the electronics could get so boggled by radiation they might stop working. But OPAL has had only a dozen upsets in a year, says Twiggs: "I wish Windows operated that well on my computer."

    Is this the developer having a dig at Windows or a reference to the fact that the pico-sats are running Windows?

  • "...it's pretty novel when you say, 'I built a satellite in a Coke can!'"

    It'd also be pretty novel to shoot a rocket up my bum, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

    :o) Love and Rockets. The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]

  • I really don't think the purpose was to produce space-worthy sats, but to give undergraduate studends an opportunity to work hand's on with the technology. I don't think there are enough opportunities like this in our undergraduate programs.

  • Yeah, but who would want a (very) warm coke?

  • Finally a scientist admits that negative mass can and does exist "We have no fuel on board, plus or minus 8 kilograms," said one NEAR scientist.
  • I don't think that -8kg of negative matter would be quite enough to nullify the mass of Jupiter.

    But then again, who really knows whether 8kg of antimatter would nullify 8kg of matter? It's all speculation, and in the end it doesn't "matter."

  • Re:15,000ft != Satellite (Score:3)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @09:24PM (#431237) Homepage Journal
    The idea is that the chutes and altitude chosen keep it up for about the same time as a low orbit pass - the builder gets to run their design thru all the G force of launch and deployment - then have the time for one 'pass' to get their telemetry up and running and downlink while the airframe is still in the air.

    We know we're not putting them in orbit (we launch to 100k ft from the same site - and even 20 miles up aint LEO either :-) the idea is to get some really cheap experience at doing something real.

    BTW they have an autonomous rover competition - same payload size as the usual 3 coke can deployment system - we drop it from 15k - you have to make it come back to a defined spot (it's on an almost flat playa so it's easier than you think - you do have to dodge the cars parked around the launch site :-)

  • Re:Cansats are nothing new (Score:3)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @09:12PM (#431238) Homepage Journal
    You can get more info about Arliss here [stanford.edu].

    The coke cans are dropped out at only 12k ft (the launch vehicle puts up 3 at a time) they are dropped on a parachute - the hang-time is about the same as for the sky-time in a single micro-sat pass so it's a great way to test if your payload can handle the stresses of launch and test your downlick hardware and software in real-world conditions....

    Arliss is growing .... there are more and more payloads going up every year (dates for this year are here [aeropac.org]) - and now they have a rover contest - launch your rover to 10k ft have it return and find it's way back autonomously to a designated target. I also hear plans are being made to extend the launch sites across the country

  • Too cool.. (Score:3)

    by shayne321 ( 106803 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @07:45PM (#431239) Homepage Journal
    Those and other NEAR pictures should keep astronomers busy for awhile. Some suggest unknown forces breaking up boulders, moving debris into flat crater pools and creating unidentifiable depressions the size of hand and footprints.

    Maybe the Heaven's gate cult [anw.com] survived after all.... Just landed on the wrong celestial object.

    Shayne

  • Re:the can sat (Score:3)

    by j_w_d ( 114171 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @09:31PM (#431240)
    They aren't satellites. Satellites enter orbit. The devices are little instrument packages that are launched on ballistic flight paths and then parachute back.

  • Amateurs have done better than 15K feet (Score:3)

    by Chagrin ( 128939 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @10:27PM (#431241) Homepage
    JP Aerospace [jpaerospace.com] was able to launch a payload to 72,000 feet using a combination baloon/rocket system ("rockoon"). They're hoping for 120,000 feet later this month (launch on the 24th/25th!).

    Also interesting, appears that even John Carmack has donated to the cause :)

    (Good luck JP!)

  • CanSat? (Score:3)

    by djrogers ( 153854 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @08:42PM (#431242)
    How can it be called a satellite if it just goes up 3 miles then parachutes back down? They'd be better off dropping them from weather baloons - they'd go higher, and it'd be cheaper to 'launch' them.
    While I think it's a cool project, if it don't orbit - it just ain't a satellite..

  • Asteroid pictures (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @07:56PM (#431243) Journal
    Before its controlled crash into Eros, NEAR-Shoemaker beamed back pictures with the best resolution ever of an asteroid. The images, one as close as 120 meters (394 feet), bring into focus features as small as a golf ball, said mission scientist Joseph Veverka. Those and other NEAR pictures should keep astronomers busy for awhile. Some suggest unknown forces breaking up boulders, moving debris into flat crater pools and creating unidentifiable depressions the size of hand and footprints.

    Oh my.

    I can see someone in the ufo community going on about Nasa photos of alien footprints on the asteroid.

    which is NOT what Nasa said.

    I do not mind being entertained by the whackos on late night radio, but I can see this getting out of hand.

    [sigh]

  • 15,000ft != Satellite (Score:3)

    by Usquebaugh ( 230216 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @08:29PM (#431244)
    Jez,
    you want to give these cans some hang time dump them out of a plane.

    Satellite requires an orbit not a descent :-)

    'Slashdot, news for nerds. Stuff that matters.' What a joke!

  • Pico Sattelites Inspiration for Military (Score:4)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @07:44PM (#431245) Homepage
    It might be of some interest that the recent military space wargames actually included pico sattelites as a possible threat.

    In this case though, the pico satellites, because of their relative ease of construction, were actually the red teams threat (red usually is the enemy to the united states, whearas the US is blue. In this case, a country like Iraq was the enemy).

    In this case the sattelites would be used as small explosive devices, set into orbit to collide or come near a US sattelite, (communications or spy) and destroy it, cripling such systems as surveillance or GPS.

  • Re:Coke can sattelites are a joke (Score:5)

    by Gorobei ( 127755 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @09:22PM (#431246)
    Well, This was reported incorrectly. These aren't amature rockets, they're High Power rockets. The difference is like the one between hackers and crackers. Anyone outside the community can't tell/ doesn't care about the difference.

    Well, the amateur rocket community is largely self-regulating. HPR vs amateur is a distinction that allows people to lauch big (100lbs+) rockets under hobbyist rules. This means commercial "hobbyist" motors (up to O class, i.e. 16000 Estee's A engines,) with only minor BATF and FAA involvement. Amateurs also launch rockets in this range, they just have different goals.

    High power rockets use commercially available motors that are certified by a governing body. Amature rockets use motors designed by the person launching the rocket and require a lot more knowledge and money (not to mention time) to launch safely. It's a very expensive hobby whereas I could afford to do High Power rocketry while I had my forst job working 8 hours a week at Taco John's High power rockets generally don't go much higher than this, and amature rockets are much more expensive and involved (high explosives certification, etc.).

    Much amateur rocket experimentation is concerned with relatively low powered motors. You try to get data with 1kg motors before you scale up to big stuff. NO rocketeers need high explosives permits (HE doesn't work for rockets.) A low explosives user permit is required... I have one, as do most serious HPR and amateur rocketeers. A LEUP lets you own/use up to 50K pounds of fuel: enough for any orbital shot.

    I can't really see a college using amature rockets as a mandatory part of the curriculum.

    There are many reasons to go immediately to amateur class rockets: liquid bi-prop and mono-prop rockets have a great bang for the buck; commercial HPR motors have sales restrictions that burden educational institutions; educational institutions get a free waiver from many of the Fire Code regs that affect hobbyists.

    A quick run through a rocket sim package (e.g. Rocksim 4.0) shows that an HPR rocket cannot exceed 70k feet or so. Those of us that are thinking about orbit are immediately in the amateur category, but we run our tests in the HPR regime for as long as possible. The cost curve (other than time spent on the phone,) doesn't really jump at the HPR-amateur boundary though.)

  • Sweetness (Score:5)

    by KurdtX ( 207196 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @07:42PM (#431247)
    Now we just need to convince Coke (with the threat of going to Pepsi) that this is worth the investment. Order it online, and in 15-20 minutes a can of coke will parachute onto your front lawn.

    Kurdt

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