This week’s episode of NASA’s Space to Ground weekly report about activities related to the International Space Station:
** Multinational Trio Undocks from Station, Heads Home to Earth – On Thursday, a Soyuz capsule departed from the ISS with “NASA astronaut and Expedition 60 Flight Engineer Nick Hague, Expedition 60 and Soyuz commander Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and visiting astronaut Hazzaa Ali Almansoori of the United Arab Emirates“.
** Touchdown! Three Multinational Crewmates Return to Earth – The Soyuz safely landed a few hours later in Kazakhstan.
**#AskNASA From Space: Astronauts Answer Your Questions – Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir on the ISS answered questions from social media sent using #AskNASA.
A sampling of recent articles, press releases, etc. related to student and amateur CubeSat / SmallSat projects and programs (find previous smallsat roundups here):
CubeSats are highly versatile satellites built up by 1 or more units measuring just 10cm along each side. Learning how to best use these tools is a valuable skill, so ESA Academy has hosted the CubeSats Hands-On Training Week 2019. Running from 16 – 20 September 2019 at ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Centre, ESEC-Galaxia, Belgium, the event was attended by 26 university students from 15 different ESA Member States and Canada.
The Training Week had a clear objective: transfer hands-on knowledge to university students who are keen to start their own educational CubeSat initiatives, or who are already at the conceptual or preliminary design stage of a CubeSat project at university. To achieve this aim, ESA Academy assembled a team of experienced tutors to lead the course. These included ESA experts, the Fly Your Satellite! (ESA’s educational CubeSat initiative) team, and two engineers from Theia Space (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid) delivering laboratory sessions with high-grade model CubeSats, called Educational Satellite models (ESATs).
One of the main objectives of the UAE Space Agency is to build capabilities in the space sector, in space engineering and sciences, especially within the university community. MeznSat, initiated in 2017, began as an education programme to design, build and operate a satellite, but at an educational level.
There is a global trend in space education programmes, encouraging the use of CubeSats or nanosatellites to engage students in satellite and space research. However, what started as an educational trend is now slowly turning commercial with private agencies and companies using satellites built by student bodies for commercial purposes.
The UAE Space Agency followed up on this trend with the founding of the MeznSat programme, a 3U CubeSat that will be used to study the environment and also look at greenhouse gas emissions over the UAE, especially methane and carbon dioxide. The programme is founded and run by the UAE Space Agency with participation by two local universities, Khalifa University and the American University of Ras Al Khaimah (AURAK).
The timetable is indefinite, starting this fall. The project is supposed to take two years. Desmond expects to start with sixth-graders; the curriculum team hasn’t decided whether the second year will continue with the same students in seventh grade or hand over to the new sixth-graders.
The question the students will try to answer is whether the frequency or location of lightning strikes is changed by global warming. Sub-questions include whether the northeastern United States can expect more frequent or severe lightning strikes; if that answer is yes, what negative (like more forest fires) and positive (like more nitrogen fixing to improve soils) consequences might occur; whether energy could be captured from the lightning; and whether, if lightning is more frequent, housing codes should be adapted.
Astronaut Jessica Meir is no stranger to extreme environments. She’s studied penguins in Antarctica and mapped caves in Italy, all of which prepared her for the ultimate extreme environment: space.
** Expedition 61 Crew Docks to the International Space Station
After launching earlier in the day in their Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Expedition 61 Soyuz Commander Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos, NASA Flight Engineer Jessica Meir and Spaceflight Participant Hazzaa Ali Almansoori of the United Arab Emirates arrived at the International Space Station September 25. Their arrival completed a six-hour journey when they docking their Soyuz spacecraft to the Poisk module on the Russian segment of the complex.
** Expedition 60 Artemis Interviews Randy Bresnik Kentucky Media – September 26, 2019
Check out the presentations on leading edge space technologies given this week at the 2019 NIAC Symposium via the videos on Livestream. The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program provides modest amounts of funding to projects that are too close to (or too over) the leading edge for the usual SBIR type of research grants.
A sampling of recent articles, press releases, etc. related to student and amateur CubeSat / SmallSat projects and programs (find previous smallsat roundups here):
15 CubeSats into orbit on October 21 as part of NASA Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) Mission 25. Some will carry Amateur Radio payloads.
TJ REVERB, developed by students at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, will carry a 145.825 MHz APRS digipeater.
HuskySat, a University of Washington – Seattle project, will be boosted into a 500-kilometer (approximately 310-mile) orbit via the Cygnus external deployment device. HuskySat will carry a V/U linear transponder provided in cooperation with AMSAT.
The Taurus-1 (Jinniuzuo-1) CubeSat carrying an Amateur Radio FM-to-Codec-2 transponder was launched on September 12 from China’s Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. The CubeSat was developed by Aerospace System Engineering Research Institute of Shanghai for youth education and Amateur Radio.
Professor Andrew Dempster of UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications has been developing and trialling a new type of receiver that looks for satellite navigation signals bounced from the Earth’s surface in a process called reflectometry.
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As he explains, reflectometry looks at the GPS signals that come directly from satellites as well as where, and at what angle, the signals bounce off the earth’s surface. He and his colleagues have built four generations of receivers that are designed to look for these bounced GPS signals from satellites overhead.
“This most recent generation of our GPS receivers we have put into space aboard CubeSats,” Professor Dempster says, who is also director of the Australian Centre of Space Engineering Research.
… Over the past 5 years the team has seen over 100 members work on the project, including students, staff and volunteers. The project has produced at least 18 student theses, dozens of conference papers, launched new research areas for UNSW winning two new ARC grants, and the UNSW team alone has attracted many hours of media interest both locally and internationally.
How NASA saved two tiny Mars satellites | SPACE INTERVIEW
Mars Cube One (MarCO) lead engineer, Andy Klesh, joins us to chat how two tiny CubeSats gave us real-time data from the latest landing on Mars. We talk about what led to naming the spacecraft after the Disney characters Wall-e and Eve, and how both Wall-e and Eve lost contact with Earth just few hours before it was their time to shine.
