Category Archives: Space participation

Satellite Watching, Space participation

Video of X-37B passes + Tracking secret spacecraft

The reusable X-37B military spaceplane still in orbit after a year was spotted recently by an amateur spacecraft tracker  (via Spaceports blog):

On Nov 24th and 28th, 2013, Kevin Fetter of Brockville, Ontario captured imagery of the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space plane in the night sky. Orbiting Earth for over year, the mission’s purpose and capability is “in the black.” — Read more about the secret mission here: http://goo.gl/A9Tkz9

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This article about the Atlas V launch this week of a NRO spysat discusses the tracking of these sorts of secret vehicles by amateur spacecraft observers: Atlas Launch Report | Government spy satellite rockets into space on Atlas 5 – Spaceflight Now

Ted Molczan, an experienced amateur satellite watcher in Canada, believes Thursday’s launch lofted the third radar satellite in the Topaz series.

“Am I convinced? I would say I am 80 percent confident NROL-39 is Topaz,” said Jonathan McDowell, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks global satellite and launch activity.

It is “always possible there is a one-off vehicle in a somewhat similar orbit. Let’s see the amateurs pick it up and get its orbit, then we’ll make a final conclusion,” McDowell said before Thursday’s launch.

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Find more about tracking spacecraft in the HobbySpace Satellite Observing section.

DIY space, Rockets, Space participation

Copenhagen Suborbitals: Update on TDS80 space capsule construction

Kristian von Bengtson of Copenhagen Suborbitals describes progress on building the TDS80 capsule that they plan to launch next summer ona HEAT2X rocket: Visual Guide – the Making of DIY Space Capsule TDS80 – Wired Science

The article includes lots of diagrams and pictures, e.g.

Amateur/Student Satellite, Space participation, Space Radio

AMSAT & ISS amateur radio news – Nov.24.13 – “A Historic Week” – 64 cubesats orbited

Go to AMSAT News for the latest headlines about developments in amateur and student satellites and for updates about amateur radio on the ISS.

ANS 328 Weekly AMSAT Bulletin – Nov.23, 2013:

* A Historic Week for CubeSat Launches

This week has seen the deployment of 64 cubesats, with 35 of the satellites operating on amateur radio frequencies, now orbiting our Earth.

Barry Baines, WD4ASW, President of AMSAT-NA and all of the editors of the AMSAT News Service wish to congratulate all of the teams that have had satellites deployed. May your birds fly high, sing loud, and live long!

I have tried to capture a majority of the events as they have occurred from the newest (at the top) to the oldest (earlier in the week at the bottom). For further information please check the team’s website or better yet, get on the air and work the birds!

* FUNcube-1 spacecraft now named AO-73
* Amateur Radio Satellites Launched Nov 21 on Dnepr
* NASA ELaNa-4 Cubesats Launched Nov 19 with ORS-3 Minotaur from Wallops, VA
* South Africa ZACube-1 Now Named TshepisoSat
* Assistance requested in receiving UNISAT-5 payloads
* Adding new satellites to SatPC32 and Gpredict
* Triton-1 Update November 23
* Delfi-n3Xt Update November 22
* FUNcube-1 (AO-73) Transponder Activation
* FUNcube-1 Transponder in Autonomous Mode
* Satellite TLE Challenge Begins
* FUNcube-1 (AO-73) Transponder Test Saturday November 23
* $50Sat Eagle2 PocketQube Operational
* BBC TV visit FUNcube station at RSGB National Radio Centre
* FUNcube-1 (AO-73): First Transponder Test
* FUNcube-1 (AO-73): First Fitter Message Uploaded
* FUNcube-1 Loud and Clear in Essex
* FUNcube-1 on BBC News
* Florida SwampSat Team Request Assistance
* FUNcube-1 Deployed
* FUNcube-1 Bletchley Park monitoring station ready for launch
* Minotaur-1 Deploys CubeSats
* Triton-1 Update
* FUNcube Dashboard – New Version v806 Released
* Help Track ISS CubeSats
* Delfi-n3Xt Update
* Help needed with the CAPE II satellite
* Dual-Band Slim Jim Antenna for Satellites
* PhoneSat 2.4
* ARISS News
* Satellite Shorts from All Over

Asteroids & Comets, Space participation

Planetary Resources and NASA partnering to crowdsource asteroid detection

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Planetary Resources “The Asteroid Mining Company” has announced a partnership with NASA

 to design and implement crowdsourcing algorithm challenges in the effort to detect, track and characterize near-Earth objects (NEOs).  All data compiled and used for these challenges will be open-sourced and publicly available.

Last summer PRI raised over $1.5M in a Kickstarter campaign to fund outreach programs, including a collaboration with the Zooniverse citizen science organization to create Asteroid Zoo. In Asteroid Zoo, volunteers via the web will scan a data set of over 3 million images obtained with the  Catalina Sky Survey to find and characterize near-earth objects.

The NASA partnership will build on this work:

Lindley Johnson, Program Executive of NASA’s near Earth object observation program, said, “This partnership uses NASA resources in innovative ways and takes advantage of public expertise to improve identification of potential threats to our planet.  This opportunity is one of many efforts we’re undertaking as part of our asteroid initiative.”

Today, there are approximately 620,000 asteroids that are tracked in our Solar System.  This number represents less than one percent of the estimated objects that orbit the Sun.  “While improving the algorithms to detect NEOs helps gain more data, additional surveys, telescopes and capability put to the search will also assist in completing the task of compiling a comprehensive open-sourced catalog,” continued Lewicki.

Astronomy, Events, Space participation

“Citizen Science in Astronomy” – Zooniverse conference, Taipai, Taiwan, Mar.3-7.2013

The Zooniverse  citizen science organization will hold the Citizen Science in Astronomy conference in Taipai, Taiwan in March 3-7, 2014: Announcing the Citizen Science in Astronomy Workshop – Zooniverse

Citizen science – the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in the research process – is a radical response to the challenge of dealing with the greatly increased size of modern datasets. The combined assessment of many non-expert human classifiers with minimal training often equal or improves that of a trained expert and in many cases outperform the best automated algorithms. As astronomical surveys and observations have continued to grow towards the petabyte scale, online citizen science projects have proven quite successful in enlisting the general public to mine these rich datasets from searching for exoplanets to identifying gravitational lenses.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together astronomers, computer scientists, and machine learning experts to focus on developing, for a citizen science approach to current and future astronomical datasets, new and improved data reduction techniques and algorithms to assess volunteer behavior and direct effort more efficiently. Such efforts are critical in coping with data from the next generation of experiments and instruments, including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), Hyper-Suprime Cam (HSC), and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).