Satellite Diaries

A reader was aghast-- outraged, I say-- at my suggestion that this precious music satellite, Project Calliope, might launch a few months late.Now, the rocket people at InterOrbital Systems are rock-solid and haven't had any reason to announce a delay. Their testing is on track. Certainly (as this blog shows) my satellite construction in proceeding in a timely fashion. So why do I think we won't launch until 2011?The answer is just about everything launches late. Late is the new early. The launch industry is predicated on being absolutely perfect with engineering details, and wildly inaccurate about when you actually launch.

NASA creates dramatic artistic renderings of upcoming launches, in full color animation, often scaled for the IMAX screen.  They're great eye candy, but they are also informative, and have genuine science at their core.For example, the STEREO solar panel deployment is fascinating to watch, even as a simulation.  It uses a highly accurate 3D model of the actual spacecraft, and attempts to balance physical realism with artistic license.  Noteworthy is the robotic nature of the deployment and the oscillation of the solar panels as they deploy.

IT arrived. With little fanfare, an ordinary cardboard box full of packing peanuts has thrown my life into panic and confusion. For the mighty packing slip says it all. "Parts&Packing List". Inside is... a piece of paper. And, hopefully, buried under the packing peanuts, also a satellite.My satellite. My InterOrbital pico-satellite. "Project Calliope", the satellite. The THING I'm BUILDING in my BASEMENT (dum-dum-dah-dum!). Did you ever wonder just what a satellite is made of? The answer is... this!

I enjoyed presenting on Project Calliope two weeks ago, at the 215th AAS meeting.  I have a partial podcast of my talk in preparation, but in the meantime, here are the visual slides from my presentation (and also up as a PDF at ProjectCalliope.com.  The most important theme I covered was the shift from a tech mindset (build a crack engineering team) to a social mindset (gather a circle of interested people able to talk this up).   Though the value of the talk was in the dialog, not the slides, this does provide a useful basic primer on the how and why of launching a personal picosatellite.Project CalliopeScience&Social Media

I've often run into the idea of 'realspace' (or 'meatspace') versus 'virtual reality' (or 'the Internet').  The concept is that they are two often separate worlds.  I disagree with that, and feel there are three spaces.  One has solid entities like people and rooms, and you interact with them noticeably.  The second may be online or it may be solid, but the interactions are between individuals and kept private.  The third is completely open, for many to access-- typically via online presence, because online lends permanence that the 'solid' world rarely has.

Today, while thrift-shopping, I found an important component for our satellite building.Yes, it's a rolling trunk, and I'll admit it's not the most exciting science prop.  But there are four important details that make this an important detail in DIY satellite building.1) Pragmatics.  I need a place to store the satellite and components when I'm not working on it.2) Conveyance.  I need something to lug the kit around when I take it over to my friend's workshop, when we eventually get to final assembly.

After wrapping up the minutiae of funding, we're finally entering the lab for Project Calliope.  Next week, I get to build a model ionosphere and replicate a spinning satellite to test what sort of music to expect.In practice, this means rigging up a magnet to replicate ionospheric magnetic fields, putting a strobe for mimicking the Sun as seen by a rapidly spinning satellite, then seeing what sort of data my detectors spit out.

As much as our 'Project Calliope' satellite is a science project, it's also a music experiment.  We are, after all, flying scientific instruments on a picosatellite specifically to make music.  So it's worth pointing out another group that is doing neat things with music invention, in this report on Berlin HackdayTheir tag line is "take a weekend, and make something".  Quoth the article:

I ran into an interesting linguistic stumbling block.  I'll call it the "It's science, so it must be hard" frame of mind.  I wrote to some friends and family about this project, saying:I'm launching a satellite for fun, to make music from space.  It's called Project Calliope, and I'm writing about it up at: http://scientificblogging.com/satellite_diaries/feed It's pretty much just me, with some friends helping with different parts of it, and a couple of sponsors helping cover costs (hopefully). I'll be the first to admit it's unusual, but I've always wanted to be part of the space race.And I received one particular reply of:

A TubeSat picosatellite lifts 200 grams of payload. That's about 7 ounces. Looked at one way, that's less than half a can of soda. But it's enough to lift an entire Nintendo DS game handheld into orbit. 200 grams can be a lot of electronics.When I committed to this project, I didn't yet have the specific electronics in mind. I've built mini guitar amps and guitar sound processors that come in well under 7 ounces. I assumed I could kit-bash stuff and create my own schematics for the final assembly. What I didn't expect was that there would be a company that already builds everything I need.

Dear Diary,It was a secret for a while, but I'm going to launch my own satellite! It's going to make music from space. Curious?It is dangerous to write about neat things. That makes you want to do them yourself. After writing about satellites, I became inspired to build one myself. And it'll be a first-- a musical satellite. A satellite whose sole purpose is to make music until it dies-- music from science.