NASA 'PhoneSat,' 1st Satellite Built By High School Students Launching Tuesday

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA 'PhoneSat,' 1st Satellite Built By High School Students Launching Tuesday
SPACE.com
By Megan Gannon, News Editor  20 hours ago






The first satellite designed and built by high school students will blast into space along with a so-called "PhoneSat" built by NASA on Tuesday night (Nov. 19). The two tiny spacecraft and 27 other small satellites are hitching a ride on a rocket launching from Virginia that could be visible from large stretches of the East Coast, weather permitting.

An Orbital Sciences Minotaur 1 rocket carrying student-built TJ3Sat satellite and more will lift off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., during a two-hour launch window that opens Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. EST (0030 Nov. 20 GMT). If the skies are clear, the launch may be visible to millions of observers on the U.S. East Coast.

You can also watch the nighttime launch live online here, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT).


High school satellite set to soar

Tuesday's launch is run by the U.S. military's Operationally Responsive Space office and is known as ORS-3. The main payload is the Air Force's STPSat-3, but the Minotaur 1 rocket will also deploy a record-setting 28 other cubesats including TJ3Sat, which was designed, built and tested by students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.

Nanosatellites like some of the ones launching Tuesday crib their technology from "off-the-shelf" smartphones, which are already equipped with features such as fast processors, sensors, GPS receivers and high-resolution cameras. The result is low-cost and tiny, but powerful, spacecraft.



The smartphone-powered nanosatellite was developed by students at the Thomas Jefferson High School


The student-made satellite is just 3.9 x 3.9 x 4.5 inches (10x10x12 centimeters) and weights only 2 lbs. (0.89 kilograms), according to officials with Orbital Sciences, which supported the project.

As TJ3Sat orbits Earth, students and amateur radio users on the ground will be able to exchange data with the satellite. The small spacecraft is outfitted with a phonetic voice synthesizer, which can convert text to voice and transmit those sounds back to Earth over ham radio frequencies. Data from the project will be made publicly available, Orbital officials said.

The TJ3Sat satellite demonstrates how the size and accessibility of nanosatellites provides new opportunities for innovation and student participation, officials said.

"It used to be that kids growing up wanted to be an astronaut," Andrew Petro, program executive for small spacecraft technology at NASA, said in a statement. "I think we might be seeing kids saying, what they want to do is build a spacecraft. The idea here is that they really can do that."



PhoneSat 1.0 (right) and PhoneSat 2.4 both use commercially available smartphones as the brains of the satellites


Phonesats in space

Tuesday's launch will also mark NASA's second PhoneSat mission of the year. A trio of NASA smartphone satellites named Alexander, Graham and Bell was carried into space in April during the inaugural test flight of Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket.

Those three satellites, which were only operational for about a week, signaled "the first baby step" for the PhoneSat program, said Bruce Yost, the program manager for NASA's Small Spacecraft Technology Program at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The new PhoneSat launching Tuesday night is dubbed PhoneSat 2.4.

"The PhoneSat 2.4 will be at a higher altitude and stay in space for a couple of years before re-entering," Yost added. "So we'll be able to start collecting data on the radiation effects on the satellite and see if we run into anything that causes problems."

Petro told reporters at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday that a fleet of smartphone-powered satellites could be useful for observations of space weather and measurements of the Earth's magnetic field.

"[By] taking the same measurements at the same time in many different places and gathering that information, we may learn a lot of things that we can't learn even with very sophisticated large spacecraft," Petro told SPACE.com. "It doesn't eliminate the need for big, complex satellites — there's still a need for that type of thing — but this fills another type of role that we haven't really been able to do before."

Petro added that NASA has no plans to ask tech manufacturers to make a phone specifically for a mission to space.

"The whole idea is to use the one they already made," Petro told reporters. "We're just going to take this as far as we can."

Among the other small satellites launching Tuesday is a cubesat called Firefly, which will study atmospheric effects of lightning for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). There's also the Vermont Lunar CubeSat, which was built by researchers at Vermont Technical College and aims to help develop the prototype technologies for a smartphone-powered satellite that could one day be launched to the moon.


http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-phonesat-1st-satellite-built-high-school-students-214225270.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Mid Atlantic rocket launch set for Tuesday night
East set to see Tuesday rocket launch, sending smartphone, student-built satellite to orbit
Associated Press
By Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer November 18, 2013 1:59 PM



This undated handout photo provided by NASA Ames Research Center shows NASA’s PhoneSat, a four by four-inch “cubesat” that will use an Android smartphone as its “motherboard.” Much of the U.S. East Coast is expected to get a view of a mid-Atlantic rocket launch Tuesday night, when the Air Force and NASA will try to put 29 tiny satellites into orbit, including the smartphone and a satellite built by students. It will launch from the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. (AP Photo/Dominic Hart, NASA Ames Research Center)



WASHINGTON (AP) -- Much of the U.S. East Coast is expected to get a view of a mid-Atlantic rocket launch Tuesday night, when the Air Force and NASA will try to put 29 tiny satellites into orbit, including a smartphone and a satellite built by students.

The launch of the privately built Minotaur rocket is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. EST from NASA's Wallops Island, Va., launch site. Weather permitting, it should be possible to see it from Jacksonville to Maine and Montreal and as far west as Detroit and Dayton.

People in the Washington-Norfolk area should start to see the rocket streak through the sky 30 seconds after the launch. The farthest places to view, a swath from Savannah to Columbus to Toronto, won't see the rocket until two to three minutes after launch.

The forecast was good, with less than a 5 percent chance of bad weather, said Barron Beneski, spokesman for Orbital Sciences Corp., which built and is launching the rocket.

The rocket is launching as an Air Force test program, carrying satellites that are smaller than many ordinary shipping boxes.

One of the satellites is the guts of an ordinary smartphone that NASA is using to control a four-inch cube satellite that it calls PhoneSat 2.4; it will be "the first use of a phone as control system for a satellite," said NASA small satellite program manager Andy Petro. NASA sent three smartphones to orbit in April and they functioned briefly before coming back to Earth, but this will control the way the satellite operates.

And this phone-run satellite will remain in a 250-mile orbit for two years, Petro said. Solar panels and extra batteries will keep it running. Because it won't actually make a phone call, NASA didn't have to buy any cumbersome two-year service plan, Petro joked.

The project, costing about $10,000 including the spare batteries and solar panel, is designed to see if NASA can get away with smaller, cheaper science satellites for its research work, he said.

One of the other notable satellites was a two-pound box built by students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology at Alexandria, Va. That cube contains a voice synthesizer that converts text to voice and transmits it back to Earth via amateur radio.


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But what the heck does it do?