Category Archives: Space participation

DIY space, Space participation, Space Radio

ISEE-3 Reboot Project – preparing for first thruster firing

The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is making progress towards resurrecting the International Cometary Explorer from its decades long hiatus in orbit around the sun. (See previous posts on the ISEE-3 reboot such as here and here.) Here is the news from yesterday: ISEE-3 Status 24 June 2014: We Almost Did The Spin-up Burn – Space College

During our session with Arecibo today we came very, very close to firing the thrusters on ISEE-3 for its spin-up maneuver. But we were not able to complete the process and fire the thrusters. The spacecraft was completely configured for a thruster firing during today’s pass. We reduced the number of pulses from 11 to 1 to make certain that we had the proper commands in place. If that engine firing proceeded successfully we’d follow with the remaining 10 pulses so as to spin up the spacecraft to the required rotation rate. As it happened we were unable to get confirmation on the very last command and put a halt to the procedure.

The spacecraft is in a safe mode – one that has been verified by telemetry. You can follow the real time Tweets of this session by looking at our Twitter account at @ISEE3Reboot. We are waiting for word of our next window at Arecibo. We are now confident that we will be able to perform the required thruster firings to spin up the spacecraft during the next opportunity.

And here is an entertaining article about the project and about the colorful Bob Farquhar who managed the original ISEE-3 program: For him, satellite reboot is about reconnecting with an old friend – Los Angeles Times.

Asteroids & Comets, Space participation

Asteroid Zoo: A new citizen science project

An announcement from Planetary Resource and Zooniverse:

PLANETARY RESOURCES AND ZOONIVERSE LAUNCH
ASTEROID ZOO, A CITIZEN SCIENCE ASTEROID CHALLENGE

Asteroid Zoo Engages Public in Search for Near Earth Asteroids that are
Potentially Hazardous, Resource Rich or Possible Human Destinations

Redmond, Washington – June 24, 2014 – Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, and Zooniverse today launched Asteroid Zoo (www.asteroidzoo.org), empowering students, citizen scientists and space enthusiasts to aid in the search for previously undiscovered asteroids. The program allows the public to join the search for Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) of interest to scientists, NASA and asteroid miners, while helping to train computers to better find them in the future.

Asteroid Zoo joins the Zooniverse’s family of more than 25 citizen science projects! It will enable participants to search terabytes of imaging data collected by Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) for undiscovered asteroids in a fun, game-like process from their personal computers or devices. The public’s findings will be used by scientists to develop advanced automated asteroid-searching technology for telescopes on Earth and in space, including Planetary Resources’ ARKYD.

“With Asteroid Zoo, we hope to extend the effort to discover asteroids beyond astronomers and harness the wisdom of crowds to provide a real benefit to Earth,” said Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources, Inc. “Furthermore, we’re excited to introduce this program as a way to thank the thousands of people who supported Planetary Resources through Kickstarter. This is the first of many initiatives we’ll introduce as a result of the campaign.”

Planetary Resources’ partnership with Zooniverse was announced in the midst of the company’s successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for ARKYD – the world’s first space telescope for public use. Last year, Planetary Resources exceeded its original US$1M goal and raised over US$1.5M with more than 18,000 people from around the globe pledging their support, ranking Planetary Resources’ effort among the top 25 campaigns in Kickstarter history.  It was then the organizations decided to create Asteroid Zoo, leveraging the public’s interest in space and asteroid detection.  The challenge is made possible, in part, by a grant from Planetary Resources to Adler Planetarium, where the Zooniverse has a large development team. Also contributing to the project is Amazon.com by hosting the CSS imaging data on its servers as a public data set.

Chris Lintott, astronomer at the University of Oxford and Zooniverse Principal Investigator said, “Zooniverse believes in doing projects that make authentic contributions to science. So, in addition to being excited to share the data from this massive asteroid hunt with the whole astronomical community, we’re especially pleased that Asteroid Zoo will also focus on improving machine learning solutions to finding asteroids. In the future, we hope to use the classifications provided by volunteers to improve automated searching and suggest new methods by which machines might take up the strain.”

Of all the asteroids ever discovered, 93 percent were found in only the last 15 years and nearly half of the NEAs were discovered by CSS. Approximately 620,000 objects are currently tracked in our Solar System – representing only one percent of the estimated 60 million asteroids orbiting the Sun. Using Asteroid Zoo, anyone with a computer or mobile device can now join in the search to track unknown asteroids. While over 90 percent of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids are known to scientists right now, less than one percent of asteroids smaller than 100m have been found. These asteroids are still capable of regional disaster, such as massive damage to a metro city.

NASA has also listed planetary defense as a top priority, having signed a Space Act Agreement with Planetary Resources last year to design and implement crowdsourcing algorithm challenges in the effort to detect, track and characterize NEAs. This algorithm challenge, called Asteroid Data Hunters, has completed phase 1 and is approaching the start of the next marathon match. It is anticipated that the data set gathered by Asteroid Zoo will feed into future NASA challenges. Data compiled and used in Asteroid Zoo and Asteroid Data Hunters will both be open-sourced and publicly available.

About Zooniverse

The Zooniverse is home to the Internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects, in topics from astronomy to zoology. It began in 2007 with the launch of Galaxy Zoo, and includes projects such as Old Weather, Planet Hunters, Condor Watch, and Sunspotter. The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.

Follow the Zooniverse on Twitter @the_zooniverse and for more information, please visit www.zooniverse.org/about.

About Planetary Resources

Planetary Resources, Inc. was founded in 2009 by Eric Anderson and Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. Our vision is to establish a new paradigm for resource utilization that will bring the Solar System within humanity’s economic sphere of influence. The company will conduct low-cost robotic space exploration beginning with the ARKYD Series of space missions that will identify the most commercially viable near-Earth asteroids. These initial missions will assist the company in enabling the retrieval of raw materials from these select asteroids, including water, precious metals and more.

Planetary Resources is financed by industry-launching visionaries, three of whom include Google’s CEO Larry Page & Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt; and Ross Perot, Jr., Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group; who are committed to expanding the world’s resource base so humanity can continue to grow and prosper for centuries to come. Some of the company’s partners and advisors include the Bechtel Corporation; film maker and explorer James Cameron; former Chief of Staff, United States Air Force General T. Michael Moseley (Ret.); and Sara Seager, Ph.D., Professor of Planetary Science and Physics at MIT. Members of the company’s technical staff have worked on every recent U.S. Mars lander including Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, and include other key non-aerospace and safety-critical disciplines. For more information, please visit www.planetaryresources.com.

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Mars, Space participation, Space Settlement

Video: A Mars One candidate explains why

Karen Cumming is a journalist and a candidate for selection by the Mars One program that hopes to put a settlement on the Red Planet. Here she gives an entertaining talk at the ideascity event held in Toronto recently:

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Update: Here is the latest newsletter from Mars One:  Would you be able to watch the World Cup from Mars? – Mars One Newsletter – June 2014

Education, Space Models, Space participation

The Hubble observatory in LEGO

A great looking model of the Hubble telescope is on display at LEGO Ideas – The Hubble Space Telescope. The site will consider turning a scratch built model like this into a production product if there is enough interest shown.

HubblebyGRusso

Education, Space participation, Space Radio

Amateur Radio on the ISS (ARISS) going strong

The ARISS (Amateur Radio on the ISS)  activities were highlighted during the ISS Research & Development Conference held last week in Chicago: Amateur Radio Role on Space Station Featured at ISS Research and Development Conference – ARRL

ARISS is the first and longest continuously running educational outreach program involving the International Space Station. The first ARISS school contact took place in late 2000, and nearly 900 such Amateur Radio contacts have taken place since then. ARISS functions with participation from the ARRL, NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russian Space Agency (ROSCOSMOS), CNES, JAXA,CSA and AMSAT. It allows students, as part of a science and technology curriculum, to speak with a member of the ISS crew and ask questions about life in space or other space-related topics.

ARISS conducts about 100 such school contacts per year, each about 10 minutes long — the time of a typical ISS pass — with students in the US and around the world. Preparation for the ARISS experience motivates both students and teachers to further their educations. Educators involved in an ARISS event can learn about electronics and wireless technology through the hands-on training provided in an ARRL Teachers Institute on Wireless Technology session — several are held each year. In similar fashion, youngsters preparing for a contact with an ISS crew member may learn about radio waves, space technology, science experiments onboard the ISS, geography, and the space environment. Some 15,000 students are touched directly by an ARISS contact each year, and many more become aware the program and its benefits either directly or via news media coverage resulting from an event.

See also the  ISS Fan Club for more about amateur radio on the ISS.