DailyDirt: DIY Space Satellites
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
It’s getting easier and easier to send stuff into low earth orbit, and more folks seem to be interested in doing it. So not surprisingly, there is a growing number of projects that offer to perform amateur experiments on small satellites. For students, the opportunity to send up experiments into space has been around for at least a couple years (via the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program), but now almost anyone can participate in a space experiment. Here are just a few examples.
- SkyCube is a satellite project on Kickstarter with $1 sponsoring 10 seconds of the mission. For just $6, you can broadcast six 120-character messages from space! [url]
- Whatever you can fit inside a ping pong ball can be sent up to the edge of space (100,000 feet) — and anyone can make a PongSat. Presumably, though, they won’t let you fill your ping pong ball with a combustible propellant and an altimeter trigger…. [url]
- The ArduSat Mission has completed its Kickstarter campaign and put up a list of experiment ideas that could be run on its Arduino-based satellite. Some of the suggestions for experiments/apps aren’t too exciting, but there’s also a prize of $1,500 for the most innovative experiment or app for the ArduSat — so someone is bound to come up with a few more ideas. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: arduino, ardusat, diy, low earth orbit, pongsat, satellites, skycube, space
Companies: kickstarter
Comments on “DailyDirt: DIY Space Satellites”
We need DIY spaceships. Just make ’em out of cardboard, what could go wrong?
Re: Re:
as long as those cardboard spaceships don’t need to survive re-entry… let’s do it. (also assuming these are unmanned and small model-sized ships)
probably need something bigger than a c model rocket engine……
Was curious . . .
Had you seen this story yet?
http://io9.com/5931018/rush-limbaughs-newsletter-rips-off-the-dungeons–dragons-monster-manual
I’m pretty sure I broadcast messages from space all the time!
The Pirate Bay space station isn’t looking far off now, is it?
Re: Re:
A baystation?
Space satellites. As opposed to what, Georgia Satellites?
PongSats!
JP Aerospace is still at it, flying ping pong balls to the edge of space.
We’ve flown an awful lot of them since this article. We’ve now flown just over 14,000.
I believe that’s more education payloads than all the rest of the world’s space programs combined.
We are doing it again, twice as big, this September 2000 PongSats are going up.
Once again we are using crowd source funding to keep it free for the students.
Here’s a link to our kickstarter page:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569698176/2000-student-projects-to-the-edge-of-space
John
John Powell
JP Aerospace, America’s OTHER Space Program
http://www.jpaerospace.com