mursat @ Linuxtage Graz, 28th of April

On Saturday, 28th of April, it happens again – the Grazer Linuxtage: a huge bunch of people meets to exchange ideas, questions and answers along all sorts of topics, that have or can have to do with Linux.
As our mursat1 is developped in free software, too, so: what better place than to go there!

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Worklab VI

From Feb. 22nd to 26th, we realized our sixth worklab.
News to tell: Richie and I went to the amateur radio clubstation, and did some audio recordings (satellite fishing).
And we have a plan for the sonification/music scoring of the travel of a weather balloon launched in the south of Graz, and after its trip to the 30kms layer of our atmosphere, come back.
The finished videos will be shown at the Interpenetration Festival December 2012 in Graz. OE6LCF will provide us with the HD-video, taken at the Graz Fieldday in July, 2012.

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Worklab V

The next worklab is in the plannning.
From Friday, 27th to Sunday 29th, January, we are going to boil our brains and hearts again together, starting every day at 11am, into the night.

soundcard prototype1

We meet at realraum, Jakoministrasse 16, ground floor.

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ARISSAT is gone

searching-arissat1searching-arissat2

 

Yesterday afternoon, on the 4th of January, we had the last contact with arissat, the radio amateur satellite that was launched from ISS on 3rd of August 2011, we had watched it – or lets say, tried to watch it – from ESC.

live from ISS 2.1.2012 watching the ISS watching earth

There is a live video stream from ISS, which you can watch always; they have 2 different cameras, so depending what they do, the switch to one of them. On 3rd of August, we could follow all actions by the Russian cosmonauts , see
ARISSAT watching at ESC

Anyhow –  we heard ARISSATs telemetry yesterday afternoon in Graz, and when I tried it again today, there was only noise…very sad…

trying-to-catch-arissat20120104If you go to http://oscar.dcarr.org/

you can see the details of contacts with satellites, and also the quality of signal reception. Last time of contact from our side was, when Arissat was flying about 180km above earth; usually LEO satellites orbit in about 300 – 350 km heigt, the ISS is currently at 400km. It is still in the list of satellites from Gpredict, but I guess, it has already burnt in the atmosphere.

 
mursat1 will probably start its orbiting travel in 310km height once it is really up there, which at the moment seems to be in late sumemr 2012. We’ll see.

 

 

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Non-Newtonian fun and some visitors during the evening

having-fun-with-maizena

 

 

 

 

 

In the second round with the maizena-mix (cornflower and water), we had even more fun.

Currently we are developing a method how to represent the pass of a satellite on moving surfaces of this liquid. See our first version of the non-newtonian-mursat-tracker!

And later on some visitors, people interested in the mursat project, came to visit, maybe to join in for the May/June 2012 exhibition here at ESC. artists visiting the team during worklab4

 

 

 

 

 

During the evening, more people showed up and we could use the chance to explain about our working processes and ideas.

First, we looked into solar panel testing. This is necesary to choose the correct resistance level 🙂

testing-the-solar-panels

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we work in the evening, we need to “cue the sun”, and then of course we get blinded by the light.

 

blinded-by-the-light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the amazing piezo-duo Christian and Hannes have already designed a 5khz soundcard working with only some microwatts of power!

the-5khz-soundcardThe sound card will be working on 8khz, but for now the tests run on 5khz.

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Impressions from the second day

The worklab is running nicely, quite a lot of people, sitting together and also working in smaller groups.around the table in realraum

digging into manuals

One of the current work packages is to deal with the piezo – how to integrate it into the mursat, how to get the signals of the particle collisions and store them.
piezo-workstation
and a few hours later
piezo-workstation2

Of course there is coding and testing going on.
coding-and-testing

And some are working with non-newtonian liquids (in our case: maizena and water), for a sound installation.
non-newtonian-liquid -in-loudspeaker

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Worklab December 2011

The next worklab will take place from 8.12. to 11.12.2011 at realraum and ESC im Labor (both at Jakoministrasse 16, 8010 Graz). We will start at around 11am every day and work on the several tasks until around 7pm. After that we will have a social event with dinner.
And then work on.

The worklab is mainly a work meeting of the people already involved, of course you can visit any time, you will see, if there is somebody available to introduce you.
We will have a public event on Friday 9.12.2011 to talk in detail and possibly introduce potential new team members, and inform everybody who is interested in the project. This event will start at 7pm and will take place at ESC im Labor.

We are looking forward to meeting you at the worklab!

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Tonight broadcast of our noon concert from Sunday, 9th of October 2011

Tonight, 13th of October, recordings of the Sonification Concert from Sunday 9th of October, will be broadcast on Ö1 (ORF) from 11pm on, in Zeitton, moderated by Susanna Niedermayr.

It is amazing to realize how much we have already learned about our surrounding world out there.
For the noon concert in musikprotokoll I gave introductions to the 4 pieces presented. I felt it was needed to build a bridge for those in the audience who had not been reading about and researching in dept about satellites, just as we artists had done.

sonifications at musikprotokoll 2011 Fotos: Julia Melcher

We presented 4 pieces, starting with “Satellitenkonzert” (satellite concert) by Jogi Hofmüller. The calculations of realtime positions of some selected satellites trigger the sound environment; elevation, Doppler shift, velocity – these types of data are used.
Jogi selected one satellite that would really fly over Graz during the time of the performance.
The realtime sonification was also realized as visualization, seeing the satellites as little dots moving over the surface of the earth.

satellite concert by jogi hofmüller

The second piece was “Windsong“, combining satellite research with our time-perception-work from Time Inventors’ Kabinet. The basic sound was a recording from a NOAA-satellite. NOAAs are weather satellites that constantly scan the surface of the world, and send their echos to the surface. I intervened in the velocity of the playback of the recording by changing it through wind time.

The third piece is “Raumsonde Venus Wega” by Peter Venus and Marian venus-wega at musikprotokollWeger. They combined video and audio, using satellite sounds, and the current position of the ISS (International Space Station) and a video recording of the ISS itself.

venus-wega at musikprotokoll2
The two earthlings tell about their imaginary travels through star winds and dwarf galaxies.

frozen windtime kabinet
The 4th composition is “Frozen Wind Kabinet” by Norbert Math.
In this piece he generates a drone. This basic sound gets modulated by intensity of wind.

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Testing The Beacon

On Tuesday July 26 the radios that will be used as communication devices on MURSAT1 arrived.  We will use off-the-shelf amateur radio equipment that will be case modded inside the TubeSat shell.  So we had these radios in our hands and that is something really tempting for children 25+.

Christian has a working setup of the beacon transmitter so we figured a way to radio-test the beacon.  Use the radio transmitter’s microphone, hold it close enough to the beacon speaker and transmit the signal across the table using a free frequency.  The receiver was hooked up to a netbook which ran a copy of fldigi to decode the CW beacon.  The experiment was conducted and supervised by licensed radio amateur Bernhard (call sign OE6EOF).  Here’s the result:  Beacon Test.

You can replay that to fldigi and should get the following result:

N OE6EOF F3M A

The N could be called the header and is currently used to tell whoever is listening how long a “.” and a “-” are (which is of importance for software trying to decode CW).  Following you find Bernhard’s call sign and next is a counter – mainly used to test counting and base 32 encoding.  The F3M represents the number 5996.  The last character is a checksum.  Now, the checksum here should be G, but a bug in the current implementation calculated an A. Beacon specs and further details will be published soon (probably on our Wiki).

 

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Symposium on Small Satellite Programmes for Sustainable Development

From September 13 to 16 2011 the United Nations together with ESA and the Austrian Government held the third (and last)  Symposium on Small Satellite Programmes for Sustainable Development at the Space Research Institute in Graz/Austria.  This year’s focus was set on Implementing Small Satellite Programmes:  Technical, Managerial, Regulatory and Legal Issues.

Almost 100 people – scientists, engineers, students – from more than 40 countries followed the invitation.  The MURSAT1 team took the oportunity and made many connections to professionals in the field.  We also had the chance to present MURSAT1 at the symposium and were delighted by the positive feedback from many of the participants.

It came as a surprise that things utterly normal and logical (for us) never occured to people who dedicated most of their professional career to satellites.

To our great surprise we could contribute our own ideas.  Especially when it comes to sonification and visualization of satellite data our input was appreciated.  On the other hand we received a lot of advice on how to overcome existing problems regarding design and limitations of MURSAT1. All in all the Symposium was an inspiring event!

The final report – which will be presented to the United Nations General Assembly – will be published at the Symposium Website towards the end of 2011.  At the same location one will be able to find all the presentations given during the Symposium as well as a lot of further material on participant’s satellite projects.

On behalf of the entire team I thank all of the organizers and participants for welcoming us at the Symposium and for respecting our project.

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