Student Satellite Ready for Space

An anonymous contributor writes "Nearly one hundred students from all over Europe have been working hard on SSETI Express Satellite (Student Space Education and Technology Initiative). Last week a handful of students gathered at the Netherlands to put the finishing touches to the flight model. The final exams in the space simulators will follow in January - the last hurdle before launch in May 2005. The satellite has been largely designed and built via the Internet. The students keep each other informed about the latest developments using a special news server and weekly chat sessions."

SSETI?

[hab136]

Are they searching for aliens [berkeley.edu] with this satellite?

Outsource spacecraft development to students

[G4from128k]

Enthusiastic undergrads are even cheaper than workers in India - a monthly dose of beer and pizza is enough to keep them working 7x24.

But seriously, this type of project is great -- providing hands-on and minds-on experience with real engineering problems and projects. Putting class-room lessons to real-world use reinforces those lessons and help motivate more learning.

Student budget?

[flumps]

SETI Express is not only built by students, but also has a student budget - preferably for free. "We don't have money, but we still have to get things done", explains Karl Kaas Laursen from Denmark.

Is it just me, or does anyone have visions of a couple of beercans with coat hanger antenni floating about in space?

Re:Student budget?

[The-Bus]

You're not too far off-base. The satellite as it appears [tuwien.ac.at] on the front page seems to be made up of a sub-woofer and 4 plainted-black trays from the cafeteria. I understand that they are already working on a custom communications protocol [cnet.com] as well.

Very exciting.

Re:Student budget?

[gstoddart]

Is it just me, or does anyone have visions of a couple of beercans with coat hanger antenni floating about in space?

Do I? Heck, I'm a Canadian. We're planning on launching that exact thing to allow us to tune in the hockey games if they ever come back on TV. :-P

Re:Student budget?

[bcattwoo]

And if anyone has a spare Delta rocket sitting around that they can borrow they would be like SO grateful.

The Linux of satellites?

[quamaretto]

Very odd to see the bazaar model being applied to something as expensive as a satellite. This gives me a weird mental image of Linus Torvalds, waving around a penguin plushie, riding a nuclear missile as it falls toward the ground.

This just seems a little too far out; at least software cannot be used to physically destroy something that costs millions of dollars (in most cases; google "HCF"?). This is a serious raising of the stakes in terms of what a collaborative, less centralized group of people can accomplish and what responsibilities can be laid on them.

Of course, it wouldn't be the first...

[ivi]

There's the APRS &/or Packet Radio related PC-Sat
(albeit by the students on the US Naval Academy)

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(Sorry about the earlier post... I hit
before , when trying to hop from Subject to
Cmment section... or did /. notice its empty
Comment section & [quite rightly] quash it?
'hope so...)