Category Archives: Space Systems

Webcast: SpaceIL to land Beresheet on the Moon today [Update]

[ Update 2: The final image returned from Beresheet as it came down the lunar surface:

Update 3:30 pm EDT: Unfortunately, Beresheet failed to make a soft landing. The descent was going as planned but then the main engine cut off and could not be restarted before it was too late.

The good news is that a low-cost privately funded and designed lunar project successfully for the first time reached the Moon’s surface after successfully going into lunar orbit, also a first for a private project.

The spacecraft made a selfie made during the descent:

]

Today Israel’s SpaceIL team plans to send the Beresheet (which translates to “genesis” or “in the beginning”) spacecraft from its orbit around the Moon down to the surface for a soft (we hope) landing. The de-orbit operation will start at 22:05 Israeli time (UTC+03:00) or 04:05 in Tokyo, 05:05 in Sydney,12:05 in Los Angeles, 14:05 in Mexico City, 15:05 in New York, 16:05 in Rio, 20:05 in London, 21:05 in Paris. The landing should happen about 20 minutes later.

A live webcast of the landing will begin about 20 minutes before de-orbiting begins:

Updates are available at Israel To The Moon (@TeamSpaceIL) | Twitter.

Here is a SpaceIL video about the landing:

More info at

The SpaceIL Beresheet spacecraft.

====

First on the Moon: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience

Student and amateur CubeSat news roundup – April.7.2019

A sampling of recent articles, press releases, etc. related to student and amateur CubeSat / SmallSat projects and programs:

** The SPACE HUAC project at Univ. of Massachusetts at Lowell involves undergraduates in the building a NASA sponsored CubeSat

The projects aims to

demonstrate the practicality of high data rate communications on a 3U CubeSat. A phased array of X-band patch antennas will allow for rapid beam steering.

** USC engineering students building CubeSat as a demo for Vector Launch‘s first rocket flight: Viterbi students build, deliver satellite to start-up | Daily Trojan

A team of students in the Viterbi School of Engineering have taken one small step toward space and made one big leap for their careers.

Early in March, these students finished building and delivered USC’s third CubeSat satellite, which is about the size of a breadbox. David Barnhart, a research professor in the astronautics department, led the students selected from the Space Engineering Research Center through the year-long building process of the satellite.

The team has successfully delivered the satellite to its customer, Vector Space Systems, a start-up developing satellites and launch vehicles. Vector will use this newly built satellite to test its technology in space and ensure it works before selling it to customers.

** Spudnik-1 project at University of Prince Edward Island in Toronto involves undergraduates and graduate students in the building and launching of a CubeSat for remote sensing applications: UPEI students continue work on small satellite | CBC News

Grant McSorley, project manager of the CubeSat project at UPEI, said the group of over 20 undergraduate and graduate students have been designing the satellite since September, and now, they’re putting the final touches on their first set of prototypes.

UPEI’s satellite, called SpudNik-1, will be used for what McSorley calls “precision agriculture” that will capture photos and monitor the state of farm fields across P.E.I.

“The idea is to take photos from space that researchers and farmers can use in order to decide where to apply fertilizer, where to apply water in a more efficient way than they’re doing right now,” McSorley said.

** AMSAT news on student and amateur CubeSat/smallsat projects: ANS-096 AMSAT News Service Special Bulletin

  • AMSAT India AISAT APRS Payload Operational on 145.825 MHz
  • Upcoming Satellite Operations
  • UT1FG/MM QSL Procedure Announced
  • Hamvention Booth Announcement
  • AMSAT Activities at Hamvention 2019
  • The Case of the Unknown Satellites
  • Upcoming ARISS Contacts
  • International Space Station Astronauts are Calling CQ Students
  • VUCC Awards-Endorsements for March 2019
  • Raspberry Pi magazine MagPi Features Ham Radio
  • Satellite Shorts From All Over

See also ANS-095 AMSAT News Service Special Bulletin – AMSAT Files Comments in FCC Orbital Debris Mitigation Proceeding

General CubeSat/SmallSat info:

====

Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past

Student and amateur CubeSat news roundup – April.1.2019

A sampling of recent articles, press releases, etc. related to student and amateur CubeSat / SmallSat projects and programs:

** Yale student team to build BLAST CubeSat with cosmic ray detector. The NASA sponsored spacecraft will launch in 2020: Student-built satellite to launch into space – Yale Daily News

On March 14, a group of Yale students learned some stellar news — NASA selected their satellite to be launched into space. The announcement marks the first time a Yale undergraduate group will launch a spacecraft.

The team — which consists of members of the Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association — received the launch grant through NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative competition. Over the course of four years, students designed a satellite called BLAST, which stands for Bouchet Low-Earth Alpha/Beta Space Telescope.

See also:

** CubeSat SeaHawk-1 with an ocean color instrument was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in December. The SeaHawk team has released the first images from the spacecraft: SeaHawk-1 CubeSat Captures First Ocean Color Image – UNCW.edu.

This first SeaHawk-1 engineering test image (pictured above) was captured by the HawkEye instrument on March 21st, 2019 at 18:47 UT from an altitude of 588 km and superimposed on Google Map data © 2019 Google, INEGI. At the current altitude that SeaHawk is flying, the pixel resolution of the HawkEye instrument is approximately 130 meters (425 feet) giving us an image size of approximately 6000 lines along track (780 km or 485 mi) x 1800 pixels across track (234 km or 145 mi). The true color full resolution closeup of the region from south of Monterey Bay to north of San Francisco (presented below) was produced by combining three of the Hawkeye bands (red band-6 (670nm), green band-5 (555nm) and blue band-2 (443nm).

The project is led by the SOCON (Sustained Ocean Color Observations using Nanosatellites) team at Univ. of North Carolina at Wilmington and also includes NASA, AAC Clyde Space, and Cloudland Instruments. The project was funded with grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

SeaHawk-1 is a 3U CubeSat (size 30x10x10cm and weight 5kg) designed and built by AAC Clyde Space and launched in December 2018 aboard SpaceX Falcon 9. SeaHawk-1 CubeSat was one of the 64 satellites included in the Spaceflight SSO-A Small Sat Express: their first dedicated ride-share mission for small satellites.

SeaHawk-1 is also the first 3U CubeSat specifically designed to carry an ocean color instrument payload (HawkEye). The goal of this proof-of-concept mission is to provide free high-spatial resolution images of Earth’s coastal regions. HawkEye, designed by Cloudland Instruments, is an 8-band multispectral instrument similar to SeaWiFS (one of the most successful ocean color missions to date).

It differs in that: it was miniaturized (10x10x10cm) to fit inside the CubeSat, band 7 was modified to improve atmospheric correction, all bands were designed not to saturate over land, and the entire sensor was built with low-cost, off-the-shelf materials.

** University of Toronto students fund and build CubeSat for space biology experiment: Lofty goals: UTAT gears up for milestone competitions – U of T Engineering News

The Space Systems Division is preparing to launch the first fully student-funded Canadian satellite into orbit. The small satellite, or cubesat — about the size of a loaf of bread — will carry a biological payload and will analyze the behavior of bacteria in space with the aim of assessing the risk of infections during a long-term space mission.

The team has a busy summer ahead: they’ll be testing the accuracy of the sensors on the cubesat, running hundreds of hours of electronics tests and conducting thermal tests to ensure their satellite’s components can withstand the extreme temperatures it will experience in orbit, between -40 and 80 degrees C.

The cubesat is scheduled to launch on the Indian Space Research Organization’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle in January 2020.

“Cassandra Chanen (Year 2 EngSci) shows off the Heron MK II, a cubesat that will take a microbiology payload to space. (Credit: Erica Rae Chong)”

** More about the Hampton University students developing CubeSat software in a project sponsored by the Virginia Space Grant Consortium:

Hampton University is part of a collaborative project of the Virginia Space Grant Consortium where students from three Virginia universities delivered small satellites to NanoRacks in Houston, to be integrated into a CubeSat deployer (NRCSD), which will be launched into space on April 17, 2019. Four undergraduate Hampton University students worked on the project by developing software to perform analysis on the data that will be received from the satellites.

“Hampton University has always been on the forefront of innovation. The work our students are doing is being recognized and utilized by industry leaders, and we are excited to be part of this collaboration,” said Hampton University President, Dr. William R. Harvey.

The satellites will communicate data to ground stations at Virginia Tech, University of Virginia and Old Dominion University for subsequent analysis using an analytical tool being developed by Hampton University students from the Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department.

More than 140 undergraduate students have been hard at work on the mission since June 2016 as a cross-institutional team. Undergraduate student leaders and team members from physics, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and computer science disciplines have worked together to make the mission a reality. The students have been coached by faculty advisors and have benefitted greatly from advice from NASA, industry and academic advisors, and NanoRacks, the world’s leading commercial space station company.

“Asanji Chofor at the CubeSat build AGILE workshop.”

** AMSAT news on student and amateur CubeSat/smallsat projects: ANS-090 AMSAT News Service Special Bulletin

  • SSTV Transmissions from ISS Set for April 1-2, 2019
  • AO73/FUNcube-1 Mode Changes
  • AMSAT Academy to be Held Prior to Hamvention Thursday, May 16, 2019
  • ARISS Out-of-this-Word Auction Starts April 8, 2018
  • International Space Station Astronauts are Calling CQ Students
  • India Space Research Organization to Launch EMISAT With 28 Satellites on April 1, 2019
  • AMSAT India Requests APRS Reports
  • GRCon19 to be Held September 16-20, 2019
  • This Month in AMSAT History
  • AmazonSmile for AMSAT!
  • Microwave Update Conference October 3-5, 2019 in Lewisville, TX
  • Upcoming Satellite Operations
  • ARISS News
  • Satellite Shorts from All Over

General CubeSat/SmallSat info:

====

Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past

Videos: “Space to Ground” report on the ISS – Mar.29.2019

This week’s episode of NASA’s weekly Space to Ground report on activities related to the International Space Station:

** A brief tutorial on how power is generated on the ISS:

Solar energy is a key element in keeping the International Space Station functional as it provides a working laboratory for astronauts in the unique microgravity environment. Astronauts rely on this renewable energy source to power the electronics needed for research and survival. In this episode, Expedition 55/56 Flight Engineer Ricky Arnold explains the process of generating power from the solar arrays on the space station to produce electricity for astronauts as they orbit approximately 250 miles above the earth’s surface. Visit https://nasa.gov/stemonstation for more educational resources that explore the research and technology of the International Space Station.

** Update on activities at Kennedy Space Center:

====

Outpost in Orbit: A Pictorial & Verbal History of the Space Station

Videos: “Space to Ground” ISS report – Mar.22.2019

The latest episode of NASA’s weekly on activities related to the  International Space Station:

Astronauts are working outside the station today:  Spacewalkers Working Outside to Upgrade Station Power – Space Station/NASA.

Expedition 59 Flight Engineers Nick Hague and Anne McClain of NASA will install adapter plates and hook up electrical connections for three of six new lithium-ion batteries installed on the station’s starboard truss. McClain is designated extravehicular crewmember 1 (EV 1), wearing the suit with red stripes, and with the helmet camera labeled #20. Hague is designated extravehicular crew member 2 (EV 2), wearing the suit with no stripes, and with helmet camera #17.

The batteries store power generated by the station’s solar arrays to provide power to the station when the station is not in the sunlight, as it orbits the Earth during orbital night. Next week, McClain and flight engineer Christina Koch are scheduled to venture outside on the March 29 spacewalk to work on a second set of battery replacements on a different power channel in the same area of the station. Additional batteries will be replaced as part of this power upgrade over the next couple of years as new batteries are delivered to station.

You can watch the spacewalks via NASA TV:

Here’s an overview of the ISS program:

====

Outpost in Orbit: A Pictorial & Verbal History of the Space Station