Satellite Shorts From All Over

• Satellite operators can find the latest information about New Zealand’s KiwiSAT at http://www.kiwisat.org which is updated weekly. Terry, ZL3QL wrote, “The project is well down the track to completion and this page will give a good idea of what is still required.” He invited amateurs to check out and respond to http://www.kiwisat.org.nz/funding.html.
• Matthias, DD1US invites satellite operators to visit his “Sounds from Space” site at http://www.dd1us.de. He has posted a collection of recordings from various space objects. Most of them are ham radio satellites and space ships.
• NASA’s two venerable Voyager spacecraft are celebrating three decades of flight as they head toward interstellar space. Their ongoing odysseys mark an unprecedented and historic accomplishment. Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977. They continue to return information from distances more than three times farther away than Pluto.
• Zarya, the International Space Station’s first component to go into space, passed the 50,000th orbit mark this week on August 14. Zarya, which is Russian for “Sunrise”, was funded by the United States and built by Russia. It launched atop a Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Nov. 20, 1998.
• An interactive guide to the International Space Station can be found on-line at: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/ISSRG/index.htm.
• Google Earth software has now added the capability to view images of the sky. Using the new “Sky in Google Earth” feature you can zoom in Hubble images. Version 4.2 of the software at http://earth.google.com/ contains the additional sky watching features.
• While not quite amateur radio related, many hams enjoy learning about scientific work in other fields. The events taking place today at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland by one of the world’s largest assembled teams of scientists attempting to discover what is considered the “Holy Grail” of particle physics, the Higgs Boson, and recreate the conditions that existed a few seconds after the Big Bang are highlighted in an interesting on-line BBC video at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6454521153918323669

http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/news/

This entry was posted on August 27, 2007 at 8:38 am and is filed under AMSAT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.