NASA Image of the Day

NASA Image of the day this morning is a beautiful photo of space shuttle Endeavour lifting off from Kennedy Space Center into the night sky with the full moon in the background (click on the picture to get a higher resolution).


Image Credit: NASA/Troy Cryder


The ovjectives of the STS-126 mission is to prepare the space station to house six crew members for long-duration missions. More info on the mission including live transmissions and blogs on the NASA Sapce Shuttle site.

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Jaluro: Just Another Lunar Rover

One of the great things about having an open source community like ours is that members are free to work on their own ideas and concepts. They can form groups to study and explore the various ideas and concepts. At the same time the lessons learned are shared with the rest of the community.

Jaluro - Just Another Lunar Rover - is a two-wheeled rover concept by Tobias Krieger from Team FREDNET. Within a few weeks Jaluro evolved from an idea into a conceptual design and now there is very active development on the prototype for this rover. Thanks to the community, there are always good ideas and discussions on our forum. Everybody is welcome to join the Jaluro development!

Jaluro wiki portal: http://wiki.xprize.frednet.org/index.php/Portal:Jaluro
Jaluro discussions: http://forum.xprize.frednet.com/viewtopic.php?t=340

Wheel and Gearbox Design for WRV1

Now that Jörg's rover concept has been demonstrated in the field the design goes on focusing on critical mechanical parts. These pictures show the design of the wheel and the gearbox. There are no ball bearings and no plastic parts on it!
Jörg's rover is called WRV1: Wheeled Rover Vehicle 1. You can follow and contribute to the development of WRV1 at http://forum.xprize.frednet.com/viewtopic.php?t=204

Rover Concept Prototyping

This prototype rover was cobbled together by Joerg Schnyder as a proof of concept for Team FREDNET's lunar rover. Even though it is built completely out of reused parts, it performs quite impressively!

Slow Scan TV Transmission from the International Space Station

Saturday at 10:05 UTC we successfully received a Slow Scan Television transmission from the International Space Station. The receiver chain consisted of the USRP+TVRX, GNU Radio software for demodulating the FM signal into audio, and the freely available Digital Master 780 for decoding the SSTV data.

The transmitted picture was taken with a camera onboard the space station looking out through one of the windows. NA1SS is the amateur radio callsign used by US astronauts while they are on the space station.






Richard Garriott has been very active on amateur radio ever since he arrived at the space station. Besides the SSTV activities he has been having voice contacts with schools and radio amateurs around the world. You can listen to Richard making voice contacts with radio amateurs in Europe in this recording.

VHF/UHF Receiver

The picture below show a VHF/UHF receiver assembly based on the Universal Software Radio Peripheral and a standard TV-tuner. The board on the left is the S-band transceiver module described earlier.



The TV-tuner based VHF/UHF receiver can receive a 6MHz wide RF spectrum anywhere in the range 50-800MHz. It has a noise figure around 8dB, which is not good enough for Lunar comms; however, it is a good cheap starting point for breadboarding and experimentation. Using a modest yagi antenna and a low noise preamplifier, we have been able to receive signals from low Earth orbiting satellites.

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.