04 | February | 2006 | Visible Procrastinations

Archive for February 4th, 2006

SuitSat

Published February 4, 2006 geek , radio , space Leave a Comment

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an escapee from the ISS wardrobe??

Tune your FM radio to 145.990 MHz.

SuitSat [1]
[NASA]
Using a simple police scanner or ham radio, you can listen to a disembodied spacesuit circling Earth.

January 26, 2006: One of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age is about to go into orbit. Launch date: Feb. 3rd. That’s when astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will hurl an empty spacesuit overboard.

The spacesuit is the satellite — “SuitSat” for short.

“SuitSat is a Russian brainstorm,” explains Frank Bauer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Some of our Russian partners in the ISS program, mainly a group led by Sergey Samburov, had an idea: Maybe we can turn old spacesuits into useful satellites.” SuitSat is a first test of that idea.
…
SuitSat transmits for 30 seconds, pauses for 30 seconds, and then repeats. “This is SuitSat-1, RS0RS,” the transmission begins, followed by a prerecorded greeting in five languages. The greeting contains “special words” in English, French, Japanese, Russian, German and Spanish for students to record and decipher. (Awards will be given to students who do this.)
…

SuitSat deployed 4 hours 49 minutes ago! The DX contacts with SuitSat are not looking promising, reports are [2] that the signal strength is low and you need a pretty big rig to get the signal

SuitSat [2]
[SuitSat]

It appears SuitSat froze without giving off any good data. Unless SuitSat returns to life, this page is closed to further posting.

Thanks to everyone that participated, and hopefully the failure will result in knowledge that can be applied to the next attempt.

Looks like it’s a gonner; next time maybe?

UPDATE Mon 6th Feb : An old spacesuit stuffed with a radio transmitter and old clothes is still emitting a weak signal as it orbits the globe, amateur radio enthusiasts say.

[1.] SuitSat [NASA]
[2.] SuitSat.org [SuitSat.org]
[3.] ISS Tracking [NASA]
[4.] SuitSat Readies for Operation on 145.990 MHz [AMSAT]

Technorati Tags: suitsat