Expanding Radio AMSAT's to include telescope.
Is there any reason why a future Amatuer Radio Satellite could not include a small telescope and CCD imaging. Would seem to me to be more productive and useful than just exchanging contact details. After all there are Weather Satellites.
Thanks Keith Sloan 2E0VBN
Is there any reason why a future Amatuer Radio Satellite could not include a small telescope and CCD imaging.
In principal, no. In practice, how much are you willing to spend? Perhaps the biggest problem that needs to be solved is how to get the telescope pointed at the target you want. To my knowledge the best pointing accuracy we ever achieved in an amateur spacecraft was AO40 at about 1.5 degrees. And it was spinning, so we only took pictures of bright things like the Earth where we could get an image with a short shutter opening. To image stars, you'd probably want 3 axis stabilization which is a hard problem to solve on an amateur budget. It's not particularly easy on
ARRISSAT-1 will have a camera aboard, but no pointing ability at all, so we'll be snapping pictures hoping the earth happens to be in the field of view in at least some of them. It'll have a nifty Russian instrument aboard to measure just how "hard" the vacuum is at the upper edge of Earth's atmosphere. So it's about more than exchanging grid squares (not that there's anything wrong with that).
-Joe KM1P
On 17 Aug 2010 at 20:24, Keith Sloan wrote:
Date sent: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:24:02 +0100 From: Keith Sloan keith@sloan-home.co.uk Subject: [amsat-bb] Expanding Radio AMSAT's to include telescope. To: amsat-bb@amsat.org
Is there any reason why a future Amatuer Radio Satellite could not include a small telescope and CCD imaging. Would seem to me to be more productive and useful than just exchanging contact details. After all there are Weather Satellites.
Satellite spin and thumbling for some with a 10 minutes effective pass make's pictures collecting in real time hard to download at 1200 and even at 9600 bauds.
ISS was sending SSTV pictures at a rate of 3 or 4 per pass and it was still pictures with a very good quality no spinning or thumbling and camera was always pointed at the same point as iss is stabilized on 3 axis
An HEO or MEO satelite will be more suitable for this task but the next HEO launch seems not to be for tomorrow.
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Luc Leblanc VE2DWE Skype VE2DWE www.qsl.net/ve2dwe DSTAR urcall VE2DWE WAC BASIC CW PHONE SATELLITE Message sent at 0104Z August 18 2010
participants (3)
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Joe Fitzgerald -
Keith Sloan -
Luc Leblanc