Crowdfunding the recovery of a lost spacecraft Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This post was original published on the MAKE Blog

The ISEE-3 spacecraft

The hackers behind the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project  have moved on to a different challenge. Not content with images, this time they want to recover a whole spacecraft.

The ISEE-3 probe was launched in 1978. After completing it’s original mission—it was the first spacecraft ever to enter a halo orbit at one of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points—studying the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind, it was repurposed—leaving its halo orbit—it was sent on its way to intercept Comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985, and then Comet Halley in 1986 as part of the Halley Armada. Afterwards, left in a heliocentric orbit, it was then used for  investigations of coronal mass ejections until 1997 when it was decommissioned by NASA.

However after the Comet Halley encounter in the 80′s the ISEE-3 was intentionally left in an orbit that would—eventually—bring the 35 year old spacecraft home, and if Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing have their way, it’ll return to a warm welcome from its creators.

They’ve set up a crowdfunding effort to cover the costs of getting back in contact with the spacecraft, and ordering it to fire its thrusters one last time to put it into Earth orbit. The intricate trajectory necessary to make that happen—including a flyby of the Moon at an altitude of less than 50 km—has already been calculated by Robert Farquhar, the original mission design specialist from ISEE-3′s Halley encounter.

Our plan is simple: we intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission – a mission it began in 1978.

If successful ISEE-3 will spend its retirement as a platform for citizen science, with smartphone apps—and a twitter feed—giving students direct access to the instruments onboard the ageing spacecraft.

The instrumentation carried by the ISEE-3 spacecraft.

While the spacecraft carries no imaging cameras, 12 of the probes 13 onboard instruments were still working back in 1999—the  last time NASA contacted the spacecraft—and it’d be a powerful tool in the hands of educators allowing amateurs and students access to instrumentation to measure plasma, high-energy particles and the magnetic fields in Earth orbit.

This is a great opportunity to put what is still world class instrumentation into the hands of the community. But orbital dynamics means that there’s only one chance to do so, and contact must be reestablished with the probe in late May or early June to ensure that the burn into Earth orbit happens during the correct window—and there are just 24 days left to find the money to do it.

The rise of the personal space program Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This article was originally posted on Google+.

Just over a year ago now, the first ever project I backed on Kickstarter was Kicksat. A project to put a swarm of small nano-satellites in orbit. The size of a couple of postage stamps each satellite has solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a micro-controller along with memory and sensors.

Today in the mail my souvenir satellite arrived, it's just 3.5 cm square. It's an engineering prototype, presumably one that failed verification, and it doesn't have it's solar cells attached, but otherwise its just like the ones that'll be flown into orbit.

An engineering sample of a flight ready Sprite nano-satellite.

At it's heart is a +Texas Instruments  CC430F5137. It's a whole system on a chip based around an MSP430 CPU, a 16-bit RISC ulta-low power micro-controller, along with an onboard RF transceiver operating in the sub-1GHz bands, a real-time clock and an integrated temperature sensor.

As well as the big solder pads at the top of the board for the solar cell there are a number of unpopulated pads on the board, including space for some through hole components, so there is certainly room for more sensors to be added on the board itself, and the MSP430 has the capacity to handle them.  

However the satellite is going to be entirely reliant on the solar cell for power, there is no battery back up on the board, and the satellite will only be able to operate on the Sun-ward side of its orbit. That means power is the limiting factor. The CC4305137 has good brown-out reset capability, probably one of the reasons it was chosen, however you have to wonder how much more can be crammed onto the board and still reliably operate. 

While it's might not seem much beyond a shrunken down Sputnik at that point, the Kicksat is ground breaking. In just fifty-five years we've advance from the point where it takes the might of one of the world's only super powers to put something like this into orbit, to the point where several hundred of them can be put into orbit by a graduate student with some enthusiastic backers.

Despite the pessimism I often express at the way the space programme is going, this is something that gives me a lot of hope that we aren't going the wrong way. That we aren't starting a march towards the abandonment of technology and a slow fall towards an age of declining possibilities and narrowing horizons.

Kicksat, the CubeSat designed to carry hundreds of these small Sprite nano-satellites aboard, is now on track for launch in the autumn of 2013 onboard the CRS-3/ELaNa-5 mission. This will be the third Commercial Resupply Service (CRS) flight to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a +SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. KickSat, along with 5 other CubeSats, will be hitching a ride as a secondary payload thanks to +NASA's ELaNa  program.

First launch for Blue Origin Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

You have to give it to Jeff Bezos, he's managed a top flight skunk works project and kept it out of the media to an astonishing degree. Despite the relative secrecy surrounding places like Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, or for different reasons Bigelow Aerospace, I've got an educated outsiders idea of what's probably happening on the inside. Of course places like Armadillo Aerosapce are running with a fairly open business model to begin with, but not Bezos' Blue Origin.

CREDIT: Blue Origin

Blue Origin's Goddard vehicle, the first sub-scale development vehicle in the New Shepard programme, coming out of the "barn" before its launch from Van Horn, west Texas, early in the morning of November 13, 2006.

On the 7th of November last year the FAA issued a NOTAM for a series of test flights by Blue Origin between 10th to the 13th of November. While the first test was reported to have taken place on the 13th, at 6:30 am local time (12:30 UTC), very little was actually known as to what happened other than the test flight was judged successful, and the vehicle had reached an altitude of 285 ft.

So the story on BBC news today which gave the first details I've seen of the test flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard, a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle, came as a surprise.



Video of the initial test flight
They're a lot further on than I, or I guess a lot of other people, thought they were. They seem to have replicated a good deal of the work done by McDonnell Douglas on the DC-X programme and might even have push beyond that, perhaps we should have expected this as the rumour is that several of the engineers who worked on the DC-X have since been hired by Blue Origin.

It really looks like Blue Origin is pushing the boundaries, and this certainly re-enforces the idea that all the interesting work on reusable spacecraft is happening in the private sector these days. My only regret is that both on the skills they need, and my obvious problems with ITAR since I'm not a U.S. citizen or resident alien, they wouldn't be interested in yet another software person. Even one with a somewhat exotic skill set...

Update: There is a good article over at MSNBC covering the flight, and they've come pretty much to the same conclusion I did. That Bezos' has only released this footage so that he can recruit some new people with heavy lifter experience. He's looking for people with experience with Delta IV or Atlas V, and those aren't small vehicles. Blue Origin isn't in the sub-orbital business like Scaled Composites and Branson, no matter what Bezos is saying right now they're playing a longer game and working towards an full blown single stage to orbit lifter.

Update: I'm in good company, as it looks like John Carmack thinks that this might be a sub-scale prototype of a SSTO vehicle as well,

When we saw the weight listed in the papers filed with the FAA, I thought that the only reason to build a suborbital vehicle that large would be if you intended to also boost upper stages for orbital work, but it doesn't look like the shown design would be appropriate for that. Maybe it is a subscale version of an SSTO, or a nearly-SSTO upper stage intended to be boosted by an even larger straight-up-straight-down VTVL. - John Carmack, Armadillo Aerosapce

Update: John Carmack's comments on the Blue Origin test have got me thinking. Unlike Blue Origin's Goddard, Armadillo's Pixel and Texel don't have an aeroshell. I'm wondering why that is? We know that Blue Origin's FAA permit allows them to go higher than Armadillo, but how high? I guess I need to dig out the permits and compare them, but I'm thinking the aeroshell is significant. Perhaps not technically, but it shows that the two companies are taking very different approaches to the business, if that wasn't immediately obvious from the way they approach publicity. It'd be hard to find a more open approach to prototyping than John's in-depth discussion of the design work going on at Armadillo after all. But ignoring that you can tell a lot about Pixel's design by looking at pictures, but there is very little you can get out of the pictures of Blue Origin's Goddard. So my bet is that Blue Origin will retreat back into their "cone of silence", as Carmack puts it, after they manage to recruit the people they need and it'll be a while before we hear from them again...

Update: I just dug up the environmental impact statement (19.5MB, PDF) from the FAA's web site. I'm not going to trawl through the 200+ pages in too much detail, but it does confirms its use of a high-test peroxide mono-propellant which is something I was wondering about as the burn looked way too clean to be a bi-propellant.