Expedition 18 lift off

Early this morning, Expedition 18 successfully lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft, carrying U.S. astronaut E. Michael Fincke, Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov and spaceflight participant Richard Garriott towards the International Space Station, is scheduled for docking to the Zarya module on 14 Oct 2008 around 9:30 UTC. NASA TV will provide live coverage of the docking event.


Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Richard Garriott - son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott - has a tight schedule carrying out scientifc research and educational projects. Amongst his plans is to have live amateur radio contacts with various schools around the world using his amateur radio callsign W5KWQ. His stay on the space station also coincides with the annual Jamboree on the Air (JOTA) event giving scouts around the world an opportunity to talk with astronauts onboard the station. Something that makes Garriott's trip particularly interesting for us is his plan to turn on the on-board slow scan television equipment that will perform automatic image transmissions in Robot-36 mode.

While slow scan television is not a technically feasible option for a Lunar mission nowadays (despite the fact that it was used by many of the early Lunar missions) this event will provide an excellent opportunity to test some of our early prototypes for ground equipment using real signals from space. The International Space Station is a very fast moving object and successful reception of the images will require proper tracking with directional antennas and active compensation for the Doppler shift, caused by the high relative velocity between the space station and the receiver on Earth.

There are many external factors that might prevent this experiment from being successful. The most significant is whether the slow scan television equipment will be turned on while the space station passes over our ground station and this is, of course, out of our control. In either case, we are very excited and are looking forward to this event.

Transceiver modules for the L and S bands

The RFX1200 and RFX2400 daughterboards provide complete radio frequency transceiver interfaces for the Universal Software Radio Peripheral in the L and S bands. The receivers have an AGC range of 70dB. The transmitter output is around 200mW for the RFX1200 and 50mW for the RFX2400. The transmitter and receiver frequencies can be controlled separately (split mode) and the boards are also capable of full duplex operation.

Universal Software Radio Peripheral

The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is an open source hardware device from Ettus Research and it is designed to allow general purpose computers to function as high bandwidth software radios. Its primary function is to serve as a digital baseband and IF section of a radio communication system. The basic design philosophy behind the USRP has been to do all of the waveform-specific processing, like modulation and demodulation, on the host CPU. All of the high-speed general purpose operations like digital up and down conversion, decimation and interpolation are done on the FPGA.

The USRP has four 64 MS/s 12-bit ADCs, four 128 MS/s 14-bit DACs, four digital downconverters with programmable decimation rates, and two digital upconverters with programmable interpolation rates. It uses a USB 2.0 interface (480 Mb/s) and is capable of processing signals up to 16 MHz wide. The modular architecture supports a wide variety of RF daughterboards as well as auxiliary analog and digital I/O.

Currently, Team FREDNET uses the USRP together with GNU Radio as an open source platform for prototyping and testing communication subsystems.

ESA’s View on Private Suborbital Spaceflights

The latest issue of the ESA Bulletin has a very interesting article about the European Space Agency's view on privately funded space exploration. Although the scope of the article appears to be limited to space tourism and in particular suborbital flights, it is good to know that the agency has recognized the value and the potential in private space activities and seeks an active role in supporting it both on the technological and on the political levels. The article can be read online here: http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bulletin135/bul135c_galvez.pdf

Hopefully the other space agencies around the world have similar positive attitude towards private space exploration. Their moral support and encouragement of our activities will indeed be a prerequisite for successfully establishing global policies that will help us achieving our goals.

EAA AirVenture 2008

I attended the Oshkosh Air Show this year. I was invited to make a Team FREDNET presentation for a GLXP Session on 2 different days. Our sessions were lightly attended, but it was an enthusiastic audience asking good questions.
The show is officially known as EAA AirVenture 2008. It was my first time, so I do not have a comparison. But I was impressed! Over 500,000 attending, 10,000 aircraft, 37,000 on site campers, a 2 hr professional air show every day,
special demonstration flights every day, 7 official days, all on 300 acres. and all accessible by attendees. Too many things to tell in one blog attempt. Certainly a highlight was the Rocket Racing League's first public flight of a racer.
There were many of my favorite planes on display. It IS a fly-in, so all the planes were operational. A U-2, the P-38 "Glacier Girl", the F-22, Sky King's plane (or a look-alike) doing aerobatics just like the TV show I remember as a kid, lots of WWII Warbirds, 2 electric! planes, and on and on. As I waited late Sunday evening in Manitowoc for the SS Badger, I reflected on the wide variance of energy for propulsion I encountered in 4 days... the F-22 ,most advanced plane in the world; the RRL Rocket Plane with a propulsion unit developed in the Lunar Lander Challenge; I drove by Wisconsin's largest Wind Farm and many fields of corn to be possibly turned into ethanol; and rode across Lake Michigan on a 50+ year old coal fueled, steam powered car ferry.

Check out some selected pics from the over 500 I took... http://picasaweb.google.com/rich911rt

www.eaa.org
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1st Moon Landing 39th Anniversary

Today, July 20 1969, a man from Earth stepped onto the surface of the Moon.

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The first manned spacecraft landing on the Moon was at 3:17 p.m. EST on July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, the Eagle, landed in Mare Tranquillitatis, located at 0°4'5"N latitude, 23°42'28"E longitude. The Eagle landed approximately 50 kilometers from the closest highland material and approximately 400 meters west of a sharp-rimmed blocky crater about 180 meters in diameter.
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from: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/

Team Frednet at CNN.COM

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/06/20/google.lunar.xprize/index.html

This is a bit of a re-hash by CNN, but hey...
it is more media coverage