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3D Printed Rockets Launched at NASA Goddard (Video)
GREENBELT, MD — On September 7, 2014, the Nova Labs Rocketry Group had its first launch at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center – Visitor Center.
Led by member Samer Najia, the outing featured 20 rockets, many designed by kids at Nova Labs. Designs were also printed from 3D models of real rockets that were recently released by NASA, including the Jupiter-C.
Two prototypes of the group’s HARP (High Altitude Rocket Project) ships were launched to see if they would be stable in flight. They were!
How The Public Can Get Involved With NASA
NASA is harnessing makers to come up with great ideas and develop technologies in several different ways. One of the most interesting is the contest series called NASA’S Centennial Challenges. NASA proposes a theme and offers rewards to the winners. Those winners can go on to create technology for NASA as well as grow their own businesses in parallel.
While they were here at MakerCon we were able to pick their brains and hear all kinds of fun and interesting stories about the competitions and the projects that have come out of them, such as Ted Sothern who started as a costumer and is now producing space suits.
Want a Free Trip to Orbit With NASA?
PhoneSat 1.0 during a high-altitude balloon test.
One of the initiatives introduced by President Obama today at the White House Maker Faire is an “announcement of opportunity” from NASA for CubeSat developers—intended to broaden the reach of existing programs to people who have no previous experience building hardware intended for space. The call is aimed directly at the 21 “rookie states” with no CubeSat presence, and will leverage the Space Grant network of colleges and universities.
There have been people building amateur satellites since 1960. The first amateur satellite, AMSAT‘s OSCAR 1, was flown as a secondary payload to Discoverer 36 onboard a Thor-Agena rocket in December 1961—just four years after the launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik I, by the Soviet Union.
A scale model of the OSCAR 1 satellite—built by the members of Project OSCAR—housed at the National Air and Space Museum.
Every launch vehicle has ballast onboard used to trim the flight characteristics—intended to move the centre of mass towards the middle of the rocket—usually the weight is a piece of lead or something similar. The OSCAR 1 took advantage of the fact and was designed in a wedge shape to fit exactly in place of one of the weights used to balance the payload in the rocket stage. It was operational for 22 days, broadcasting “Hi” from its onboard beacon before reentering the Earth’s atmosphere
Dreamed up in the late 90’s the CubeSat—an open source architecture that lets you pack anything you want into the 10cm × 10cm × 10cm cube so long as it weighs less than 1kg—has become an accepted standard in the launch business, and makes use of exactly the same space in the rocket. But these days the microsatellites fly on most launches, and NASA has a mandate that every launch vehicle they charter has the ability to deploy them, providing the opportunity for makers to build small satellites, and to demonstrate new innovative technologies and conduct scientific research in a space environment.
PhoneSat 2.5 launched onboard the SpaceX CRS-3 mission to the ISS.
Deployed in orbit from a standard launcher—called a P-POD—which uses springs to push the microsatellites away from the primary launch vehicle, the orbit your satellite gets is entirely determined by what your rocket provider has sold you. Most likely your satellite will enter a standard 250km or so nearly circular orbit, either equatorial or polar. Such an orbit will last—because of drag by the tenuous ionosphere—somewhere between 3 and 16 weeks before the satellite will reenter the atmosphere and burn up.
“There is a big push for the miniaturization of satellites. The CubeSat classification is such that a 1U CubeSat is just 10cm cubed, a 2U is 10x10x20cm, and a 3U is 10x10x30cm—you get the idea. That really isn’t much room for all of the control systems, electrical systems, propulsion systems, etc., and don’t forget to leave room for the payload science. The use of Arduino, cell phones and custom miniaturized systems are in high demand. The neat thing is that the cost to build a satellite has shrunk dramatically. College students are building them as senior design projects. We hope to see a reduction in launch costs and an increase in launch opportunities so that all of these satellites can fly their science.” — Sam Ortega, manager of the Centennial Challenges Program at NASA‘s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL
There is a huge range of CubeSat builds from simple beacons, much like OSCAR 1, built by schools and amateurs in their garages, to much more complicated spacecraft testing cutting-edge technologies like new types of rocket propulsion, or even interplanetary spacecraft launched towards Venus.
NASA even uses the CubeSat themselves as part of its Small Spacecraft Technology Program, where they’re experimenting building satellites using consumer-grade, off-the-shelf technologies like smartphones and the Arduino platform. SkyBox Imaging—recently acquired by Google for $500 million—also makes use of the standard CubeSat form factor, as does PlanetLabs who own and operate the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in the world.
So if you’re thinking about building a CubeSat, and you’re in one of those 21 “rookie” states, then look out for the Announcement of Opportunity later in the year from NASA.
President Obama is hosting the first-ever White House Maker Faire to recognize the contributions of makers who bring creativity and technical ability to a broad range of projects. If you are a maker or a friend of makers, please become an advocate for expanding opportunities for making and makers in your community.
To show your support for growing the maker community, we encourage you to sign the “Building Maker Communities” pledge and put yourself on the map!
Space Robots, Mars Rovers, and NASA Scientists coming to Maker Faire Bay Area
The NorCal Mars Society is making better rovers for human planetary exploration.
Space exploration is a dream near and dear to many makers’ hearts and is a great way to encourage kids’ interest in math and science. But it doesn’t take a government agency to put a satellite into space anymore. From crowdsourcing space initiatives and micro satellites to bringing makerspaces to Mars, these makers will be showing off the latest and greatest developments and challenges in space research at Maker Faire Bay Area on May 17-18.
Exhibits
NorCal Mars Rover Project
The NorCal Mars Society is back at Maker Faire to show off their rover prototypes and convince you that our future is on the red planet.
makerfaire.com/makers/norcal-mars-rover-project-2/
Pisces Project
The Canadian Space society aims to create two fish-like robots “equipped with cameras/ sensors/tools to: assist in monitoring the environment in/outside the space station, aid astronauts on missions, or take the public on live virtual tours of the space station.”
makerfaire.com/makers/pisces-project/
ISS-Above
From maker Liam Kennedy about his Raspberry Pi-powered tracker:
The International Space Station passes overhead most populated areas of the world every day. If only you knew it was there. ISS-Above lights up when the ISS is nearby, but that’s not all. It can also tweet a message to the Space Station and it has its own built-in web server to give you a ton of information about current and future passes.
Personal Cosmos takes data like temperature readings or satellite images and projects it onto the inside of a spherical display. Keep track of what’s happening on Earth or even map data from the moon or Mars.
makerfaire.com/makers/personal-cosmos-digital-globe-with-projector-2/
SpaceGAMBIT – Hackerspace Space Program
From Program Manager Jerry Isdale:
SpaceGAMBIT is a 2 year $500k US Government (DARPA) grant funded project to get makers involved in Space education, research and development. We will present summary of the projects funded in first year and talk about our 2nd year projects. The first of our year 2 endeavors is a ”Portable Workstation Contest” with Instructables.com which will be concluding about the time of the Bay Area Maker Faire.
makerfaire.com/makers/spacegambit-hackerspace-space-program/
Deadly Space Rocks! Help NASA Save the Earth This Weekend
Does the thought of an asteroid falling out of the sky keep you up at night? Although an asteroid is unlikely to hit any time soon, such an impact could instantly destroy our ozone layer, destroy an entire city, or wipe out most life on earth.
According to Dr Ed Lu of the B612 Foundation, we’re not seeing these space rocks coming:
“data from the nuclear weapons test warning network… detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts, “It shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare — but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought. The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown [were] detected in advance, is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a “city-killer” sized asteroid is blind luck.”
Well instead of worrying, you can make a difference this weekend with NASA’s 2014 International Space Apps Challenge. This year’s SpaceApps includes a number of opportunities for Makers to help explore asteroids and communicate the message of how important of a problem this is. Start off by learning the state of the art for hunting and studying asteroids. This Thursday, April 10 at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific (20:00 GMT) there will be an
Questions can be asked on Twitter using #Asteroid #SpaceApps or in the comment stream for the Google+ Event page.
Now Make Something
The International Space Apps Challenges’ website has a whole section dedicated to Asteroids, including:
- ASTEROID IMAGERY SHARING
- Design an open-source platform for sharing crowd-sourced asteroid imagery—including observations that have already have been logged, as well as newly observed Near Earth Objects. Consider integrating tools to make it easy for amateur astronomers around the world to contribute both primary and follow-up imagery
- ASTEROID MISSION SIMULATORS
- Asteroid missions come together thanks to space mission simulators, physics-based game engines, asteroid databases, and data visualizers. Each application excels at certain aspects of a mission: One simulator is great at propulsion, another provides the capability to create the spacecraft cockpit, and the asteroid databases provide details about the ephemera. However, mission simulations can be limited to a single computer. Though a few simulators and game engines provide a networking capability, they can only exchange data with other copies of the same application. This challenge is to create a solution that would integrate a variety of simulators, game engines, databases, and data visualizers into a mission simulation that is distributed across the Internet.
- ASTEROID PROSPECTOR
- Develop a game to travel across the solar system, going from asteroid to asteroid. You must decide which asteroid to visit and mine next, given a field of asteroids that vary in location, composition, size, and more. A major part of this challenge is learning over the course of the International Space Apps Weekend what the purpose and value of an asteroid resource industry could be and incorporating it into the game.
- ASTEROID WATCHERS
- Amateur astronomers have made many discoveries. Create an open source network of quick-response robotic telescopes that would enable fast follow-up observations of potentially-threatening asteroids. Solutions should enable telescopes in all hemispheres to be controlled from a central location quickly, much like moving a webcam. Ideal solutions will integrate hardware and software, though ambitious Autonomous Robotic Observatories network concepts and methods for building and maintaining the network would be highly desirable.
- CREATE YOUR OWN ASTEROID MISSION
- How would you send humans to explore an asteroid? How would you send a spacecraft to survey the asteroid belt? And how would you deflect an asteroid that was on a threatening course with Earth?
- MAKE YOUR OWN ASTEROID MOVIE
- Create an asteroid movie with real asteroid observation data. Asteroid observation movies typically visualize an asteroid’s trajectory, spin rate, shape, albedo, bi-directional reflection, texture, roughness, strength and composition.
- VISUALIZE THE ASTEROID SKIES
- Creating data aggregators and visualizations of asteroid data can educate the public about the need to explore asteroids and protect the Earth from them.
Sign up for the challenges and start putting ideas on the challenges’ hackpad; maybe then you’ll be able to rest easy. Shortly before the event, you will be able to create Project pages that describe your proposed solution to the Challenge. Then, over the weekend of April 12-13, online and at various event locations worldwide, you and other makers may start to collaborate on solutions to your projects. From there, the SpaceApps website will fill you in on what honors await the winners of the various challenges. Good luck! The Google Hangout can be watched here
Interplanetary Makers: NASA Needs Your Input!
Many makers dream of building their own spacecraft to explore the cosmos. NASA is gearing up to help makers fulfill these dreams by first asking the community the fundamentals: What are the best incentives for makers to build, fly, and communicate with small satellites in deep space?
This isn’t the first time private citizens have been offered a chance to compete this far from home. Since 2007, the Google Lunar X-Prize has inspired contestants to try landing the first private rover on the moon. However, early criticisms that the GLXP is too much of a technical challenge to be winnable may be ringing true in light of the diminishing number of participants. Not surprising given that the well-funded, Chinese government-backed “Yutu” rover experienced difficulties shortly after its first harsh lunar night.
However, NASA’s approach to engage makers seems to be more pragmatic in that it separately tackles two of the biggest problems with deep space exploration: communications and propulsion systems. According to the Agency’s recently released “Request for Information:”
NASA is considering initiating two challenges to incentivize development of deep space science and exploration capabilities for small spacecraft, including CubeSats, with the intention of broadening the national capability to support future exploration architectures. The first challenge will focus on finding innovative solutions to deep space communications with small spacecraft, while the second focuses on primary propulsion for small spacecraft. Together, these challenges are expected to contribute to opening deep space exploration to non-government spacecraft for the first time.
Some of the proposed prizes would include monetary awards for demonstrating the following milestones for long-range communications systems:
- Communication Subsystem – Ground Demonstration and Selection for Launch
- Largest Amount of Data Transmitted from Distance of Lunar Orbit
- Last CubeSat Standing (Farthest CubeSat Transmission to Earth)
and for propulsion systems:
- Propulsion Subsystem Ground Demonstration and Selection for Launch
- First CubeSat to Achieve Lunar Orbit
Initial timeframes for these challenges start with an anticipated draft release of rules in late April, with possible review of competitors’ submissions by the end of 2014. CubeSat launches could be scheduled as early as the December 2017 as secondary payloads aboard NASA’s Orion and Space Launch System vehicles.
Although the official comment period has ended, program manager Dr. Larry Cooper is still very interested in hearing from you. Read the details in the RFI at http://go.usa.gov/BBSj and send Dr. Cooper an email at HQ-STMD-CentennialChallenges@mail.nasa.gov; use Deep Space Spacecraft Challenges on the Subject line.
