Tweets From Space
The University of Tokyo’s Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory (Nakasuka) built and launched a cubesat, 4-in/10-cm square, in 2005. The low-earth orbit spacecraft is now sending out updates via Twitter, all by itself.
The tweets, in Japanese, even feature little twitpics and have assembled over 2,600 followers. Some detail, via Asiajin:
Nakasuga Lab., the University of Tokyo, introduced a bot account tweeting the real-time state of a satellite which is located in the earth low orbit. The tweet(@XI-V) keeps us update with parameters like the satellite’s surface temperature, battery voltage and where it is located over of the planet and also shows us still images shooting the planet from the satellite in the space.
As we’ve blogged before, real-time tweets from space has had human intervention. This is automatic, and that’s kinda cool. This information is more than the poor boys at Intelsat have regarding the Galaxy-15 spacecraft. They get no telemetry data at all, but they do have some ranging info and ephemeris data.
As for CubeSat XI-V, a job well done by the rocket scientists at Nakasuka!
