Really Rocket Science

The Tartan Online, Carnegie-Mellon’s student newspaper, chooses Gravity Probe B as its "Experiment of the Week":

Gravity Probe B, a well-endowed NASA/Stanford satellite, is at this moment orbiting the Earth. The satellite’s main feature is its four perfectly spherical, shiny balls. These balls serve as the world’s most perfect gyroscopes, used in an extraordinarily complex and expensive experiment to observe the effects of general relativity…. Einstein’s theory predicts that a rotating massive body should slowly “frame-drag” space and time around with it. Over time, this dragging effect should push the gyroscope’s axis of rotation about 40 milliarc-seconds out of alignment. That’s the width of a human hair as seen from 10 miles. The probe intends to measure this to an accuracy of one percent.

Stanford University, which is working with NASA on the mission, has a mission status webpage that is worth checking out. Also be sure to check out the vehicle tour and the image gallery, featuring schematics of the satellite and pictures of the launch. What other satellite mission websites have you found? Post a link in the comment, or post your own blog entry, and we may promote your link to the homepage.

I don’t know what to say about this, also spotted at Satellite2006, except that it’s exceptionally cool. Design-wise, it reminded me of an iPod right away.  Gigasat seems to have absorbed some design sensibility from the iPod phenomenon. Their sleek driveway antennas won’t fit on in your pocket, but the right one might look good on your SUV.

I’m not exactly what anyone would call a “car guy.” As long as it has four wheels, a radio, and A/C (a necessity in the South), I don’t need to know much more. But when I saw a car at the Sattelite2006 exhibit hall, I figured it must have something to do with satellite radio. Besides, if it involves any sort of gadgetry, that’s enough to get my attention as long as I don’t have to look under the hood.

This particular car was sitting at the RaySat booth, and the woman there was nice enough to take minute off from her setup supervising to give me permission to snap a picture and ask a question. (Just one question. She was kind of busy.) It wasn’t until I read the literature I grabbed when I walked away that I was a bit off in my satellite radio assumption. I needed to aim higher.

The car pictured above, according to the RayStat rep. I chatted with briefly, is going to get outfitted with a product called StealthRay, a “low-profile antenna” (i.e. so flat it looks like a roof-mounted spaceship) designed to bring high-speed internet to moving vehicles (among other things). Like I said, I’m not a “car guy,” but RaySat also has a product that brings high-speed internet to trains. If they could get something like that working on the D.C. subway system, I’d be forever grateful. And I wouldn’t even blame them when inevitably miss my stop while surfing the web.

I spent most of Monday afternoon hanging out at the Sattelite2006 conference. Actually, I spent most of it wandering around the exhibit hall while setup was in full swing. Even that was an education for me, a guy whose knowledge of satellites doesn’t extend much beyond the satellite TV dish outside my house. As I wandered around, dodging forklifts and ducking around big wooden crates, I saw a few things that caught my eye. 

The banner statement at the Internet Solutions booth — Communications Convergence from Africa for Africa — caught my eye. In fact, it stopped me in my tracks because it reminded me of my previous post about wireless networking in the developing world. OK, it’s vaguely related, but close enough to make me take a closer look. Based on their news page, it looks like they’ve been busy in Ghana most recently, and mostly with corporate work. There wasn’t anyone at the IS booth when I stopped by, but I look forward to coming back tomorrow and learning more about their work to “enable people and businesses to share information and interact with one another – anywhere, at any time, over any protocol.”

Yesterday we wrote about SuitSat, the old Russian space suit stuffed with radio and electronics gear that was slated to be kicked out of the International Space Station. For a few days, SuitSat would serve as a satellite for amateur radio enthusiasts, before its batteries ran out and the pull of gravity brought it back into the mesophere, for prompt incineration as it fell back to earth.

The “launch” of SuitSat yesterday made big news; MSNBC has a video of astronauts giving the suit the boot here.

But is that suit still in fashion? Australian ABC reports that SuitSat has gone off air:

Plans to use an old Russian spacesuit launched from the International Space Station as a make-shift radio satellite have been short-lived.

American astronaut William MacArthur and Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev released the make-shift satellite, dubbed SuitSat, at the start of a six-hour spacewalk.

But before they were back inside, SuitSat’s mission was over.

NASA’s Mission Control Centre in Houston, Texas, says the transmitter ceased operating very quickly after its deployment.

An international team of ham radio enthusiasts who organised the educational project and built the hardware had expected SuitSat to last at least a few days.

The SuitSat website currently has a more optimistic– if guarded– report:

Current thinking is SuitSat is transmitting, but far weaker than expected. Several reliable reports of short snatches of the voice and SSTV signals have been reported. It is recommended that you continue to listen during passes over your area. Please report any positive contact only.

To find a map of SuitSat’s orbit, click here.

Call it orbital recycling:

Thanks to an innovative Russian recycling program, amateur radio fans expect to be hearing from a new recruit in orbit when an old spacesuit gets a new life as a satellite this week.

Beginning on Friday, SuitSat should be on the air, broadcasting on FM 145.990 MHz.

Rather than being launched, this satellite will just get tossed into orbit by the International Space Station crew during a spacewalk slated to begin on Friday evening…..

The old suit was destined for the trash bin until it came to the notice of an international team of amateur radio buffs, said Orlando, Florida, resident Lou McFadin of the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp., or AMSAT.

A Russian colleague attending an AMSAT meeting in 2004 came up with the idea of putting a radio inside a soon-to-be decommissioned spacesuit and having astronauts boot it out the hatch. The all-volunteer effort, aided by corporate donations of equipment and by Moscow, is largely educational.

Space station flight engineer Valery Tokarev will do the honors, with assistance from U.S. astronaut and current space station commander Bill McArthur….

The suit is expected to drift away from the station and begin its short life as a radio satellite.

It will not take calls, but only relay prerecorded messages and transmit an as-yet mysterious digital picture. Batteries will power SuitSat’s radio and electronic gear for up to 90 hours, McFadin said.

Eventually, the suit will be pulled into Earth’s atmosphere and be incinerated.

Satsuit! Now that’s pretty cool.

I myself have got a couple of suits that should be incinerated. They transmit a not-so-secret message of tackiness.

No, we’re not talking about a petulant singer and a rock band (though we’re familiar with the type); we’re talking about an unusual astronomic event captured by the European Southern Observatory:

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers [1] have recorded a massive star moving at more than 2.6 million kilometres per hour. Stars are not born with such large velocities. Its position in the sky leads to the suggestion that the star was kicked out from the Large Magellanic Cloud, providing indirect evidence for a massive black hole in the Milky Way’s closest neighbour. These results will soon be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters [2].

“At such a speed, the star would go around the Earth in less than a minute!”, says Uli Heber, one of the scientists at the Dr. Remeis-Sternwarte (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) and the Centre for Astrophysics Research (University of Hertfordshire, UK) who conducted the study.

The hot massive star was discovered in the framework of the Hamburg/ESO sky survey far out in the halo of the Milky Way, towards the Doradus Constellation (“the Swordfish”).

“This is a rather unusual place for such a star: massive stars are ordinarily found in the disc of the Milky Way”, explains Ralf Napiwotzki, another member of the team. “Our data obtained with the UVES instrument on the Very Large Telescope, at Paranal (Chile), confirm the star to be rather young and to have a chemical composition similar to our Sun.”

The data also revealed the high speed of the star, solving the riddle of its present location: the star did not form in the Milky Way halo, but happens to be there while on its interstellar – or intergalactic – travel.

“But when we calculated how long it would take for the star to travel from the centre of our Galaxy to its present location, we found this to be more than three times its age”, says Heber. “Either the star is older than it appears or it was born and accelerated elsewhere”, he adds.

Be sure to check out an artist’s rendering of the star here.