Category Archives: Space participation

Education, Events, Space participation

Moon Day 2015 at the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas, Texas

If you are in the Dallas area on July 18th, check out the Moon Day event at the Frontiers of Flight Museum.:

Moon Day is an annual Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)-focused, space-themed public event sponsored by the Frontiers of Flight Museum and the National Space Society of North Texas. The event brings together space exploration-oriented groups, organizations and institutions in North Texas to share their activities and inspire new generations to embrace a scientific and technological future.

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Activities, classes and exhibits will include:

DIY space, Science and Technology, Space participation

“The New Shop Class” by Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron

My friend Joan Horvath, The 3D Printing Evangelist, has a new book out co-authored with Rich Cameron titled, The New Shop Class: Getting Started with 3D Printing, Arduino, and Wearable Tech –

The New Shop Class connects the worlds of the maker and hacker with that of the scientist and engineer. If you are a parent or educator or a budding maker yourself, and you feel overwhelmed with all of the possible technologies, this book will get you started with clear discussions of what open source technologies like 3D printers, Arduinos, robots and wearable tech can really do in the right hands. Written by real “rocket scientist” Joan Horvath, author of Mastering 3D Printing, and 3D printing expert Rich Cameron (AKA whosawhatsis), The New Shop Class is a friendly, down-to-earth chat about how hands-on making things can lead to a science career.

More about Joan’s earlier book Mastering 3D Printing

Mastering 3D Printing shows you how to get the most out of your printer, including how to design models, choose materials, work with different printers, and integrate 3D printing with traditional prototyping to make techniques like sand casting more efficient.

You’ve printed key chains. You’ve printed simple toys. Now you’re ready to innovate with your 3D printer to start a business or teach and inspire others.

Joan Horvath has been an educator, engineer, author, and startup 3D printing company team member. She shows you all of the technical details you need to know to go beyond simple model printing to make your 3D printer work for you as a prototyping device, a teaching tool, or a business machine.

Follow the latest news from Joan at

Eyes in the Sky, Space participation

Zooniverse uses Planet Labs images to help direct aid in Nepal

The citizen science program Zooniverse used satellite imagery from Planet Labs to help spot areas of Nepal in urgent need of assistance after the earthquake: Disaster Response in Nepal and The Zooniverse – Zooniverse

Very soon after the recent magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Nepal, we were contacted by multiple groups involved in directly responding with aid and rescue teams, asking if we could assist in the efforts getting underway to crowdsource the mapping of the region. One of those groups was Rescue Global, an independent reconnaissance charity that works across multiple areas of disaster risk reduction and response. Rescue Global also works with our collaborators in machine learning here at Oxford, combining human and computer inputs for disaster response in a project called Orchid. And they asked us to help them pinpoint the areas with the most urgent unfulfilled need for aid.

And so we sprang into action. The satellite company Planet Labs generously shared all its available data on Nepal with us. The resolution of Planet Labs’ imagery – about 5 metres per pixel – is perfect for rapid examination of large ground areas while showing enough detail to easily spot the signs of cities, farms and other settlements. After discussions with Rescue Global we decided to focus on the area surrounding Kathmandu, with a bias westward toward the quake epicentre, as much of this area is heavily populated but we knew many other, complementary efforts were focusing on the capital itself. We sliced about 13,000 km2 of land imagery into classifiable tiles, and created a new project using brand new Zooniverse software (coming very very soon!) that allows rapid project creation.

Continue…

Space Arts, Space participation, The Moon

The ‘Moon Drawings’ project – send your drawing to the lunar surface

The Moon Arts Project at  Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has partnered with the CMU Planetary Robotics Team and Astrobotic Technology team in the Google Lunar XPRIZE to open the Moon Drawings project. It is

an initiative at Carnegie Mellon University to extend the reach of artistic expression to the Moon. Using this web site, you can contribute a drawing—which will be micro-etched on a sapphire disc, sent to the Moon aboard a robotic lander/rover, and potentially traced by the rover into the Moon’s soil. The disc of drawings, contained in a sculpture called the Moon Arts Ark, and generously conveyed to the Moon by our partners at Astrobotic Technology and the CMU Planetary Robotics Team, will be shuttled to the Moon from Cape Kennedy in 2016 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It will remain there for potentially millions of years.

Go to Make a Moon Drawing where you can try your hand at drawing something compelling with a continuous line of no more than 1000 points.

Amateur/Student Satellite, Space business, Space participation

Students plan to put billboards on sides of Cubesats

Three PhD student researchers in engineering at the University of Leuven (Belgium) founded SpaceBillboard.com. Their plan is to sell squares on a grid on the side on the side of a small CubeSat spacecraft where companies can place ads or logos and individuals can put personal messages.

SpaceBillboard sells advertisement space on a billboard that will be launched into space on board of a satellite. This will be the first advertisement platform ever to pass the boundary of space. The revenues of this project will be used to sponsor space research at the University of Leuven. But this is not just charity. This unique story will go around the world as well. 

The money raised from the billboards will go for space research:

SpaceBillboard supports innovative space research. More precisely, we want to support research on CubeSats. The first CubeSats were developed as student projects in universities, but by now, space agencies such as NASA and ESA have recognized their potential. But what makes them so special?