Sydney and Melbourne Workshops for Sprite Satellites Scheduled for 2012-13

9th Nov 2011

PlusComms is excited to announce that it is launching a series of workshops for the upcoming Sprite Mission to be launched from the US in 2013. This is a truly amazing one time opportunity to be one of the first schools to own and fly a spacecraft. Initial workshops are scheduled for Melbourne and Sydney Australia. PlusComms Pty Ltd,an Australian based telecommunications company that works with space communications,will provide the framework for the workshops.

The Sprite Spacecraft are a swarm of tiny satellites to be launched by Zac Manchester,a graduate student in Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. He and his team have designed a swarm of these small spacecraft and a delivery system. You can buy a basic spacecraft from the KickSat team for US$300 and you can track it,but if you want to program your own spacecraft to do experiments with the Kidz-In-Space Fleet you will need to be part of our workshop.

The workshops are expected to commence early in 2012 with delivery of the spacecraft to the workshop in mid 2012. It is hoped that the launch window will be sometime in 2013. More workshops will be added as required.

PlusComms Workshops:

Sydney: Conducted by Robert Brand –Telecommunications Manager,Echoes of Apollo,Wotzup editor with programing experience and a long history of missions requiring deep space communications,including NASA’s Voyager and ESA’s Giotto probes.

Melbourne: Conducted by David W Galea –Science Teacher at Baden Powell college;Part of the Synergy Moon Team working with our lander development group as a lead researcher and computer systems designer.

Country Schools in each state can join us by Skype.

Cost of the Workshops –A$600 for each Sprite and two representatives

Registrations must be made immediately and no later than 1st Dec 2011 to confirm a place in the workshop. Registration details will be posted shortly,but please let us know ASAP by emailing me at robert.brand@pluscomms.com The price is in Australian dollars.

Who Can Attend

The nominated two representatives –anyone or any group,but especially students and schools.

Additional representatives at A$200 per person. This does not provide you with additional Sprites.

What You Will Receive

• Your name on one of KickSat’s panels that will fly into space.
• A replica Sprite spacecraft of your own as a souvenir.
• Your own Sprite in space with your initials in its radio.
• A programing and experiment workshop with approximately 10 evening meetings over a year.*
• A certificate at the end of the workshop for the representative and one for the organisation represented.*
• Access to the experimental data from the orbital flight.*
• The opportunity to contribute to mission experiments.*
• Be publicly part of the Kidz In Space fleet mission team.*
• Your craft will be part of the Kidz in Space Fleet.

* Additional representatives will receive these items only

Note,you can buy a Sprite direct from the KickStart page for $300 and join the fleet. You will not however be part of our swarm experiment nor will you be allowed to attend workshops.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/251588730/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space

Benefits of our Workshop

We are able to provide a group arrangement especially for schools and students:

• It is cheaper than the KickSat development kit alone.
• The workshop will allow access to a greater number of experiments.
• Programming support.
• We will end up with a single program for all the workshop sprites so programing ability is not essential.
• Education on many of the flight aspects.
• Access to experts in the space sector.
• Materials for teachers and students.

Please note that these workshops are NOT part of the KickSat Sprite project,but the ability to conduct such workshops is supported by the KickSat Sprite team.

Do I need to Program Computers?

No. That will be optional. You may just be attending so that you can learn and be inspired or to inspire your students. The embedded software side will be an optional part of the workshop and included in the fees.

Classroom Workshops.

If a class or school can purchase 6 or more sprites,we will be happy to conduct classes to support the students within their schools. No more than 30 students can attend the workshop which may be during out of school hours. A teacher will need to be available during the sessions. Better results will be with groups of 12-20. Currently the courses will be held in Metropolitan area of Sydney or Melbourne. The workshop may concentrate more on the satellites,the experiments,the science and the expectations rather than teaching embedded programing. This will be more about inspiring students,but programming will be possible.

Contact Us First

Before you rush in and buy a Sprite,please note that you will need to buy through PlusComms and not the KickSat website. PlusComms gets a special deal by running the workshops. If you buy direct,you can still join the fleet,but you will NOT be able to attend the workshops.

Who are PlusComms?

PlusComms are heavily involved in space communications are currently building a Global Space Network with sites in Australia,the US and UK.

Contact PlusComms by visiting our “Contacts”page located under the “About Us”Menu tab or Click Here

You can hear the Manager of PlusComms,Robert Brand,talk about the project on the well-known “The Space Show”by Clicking Here

MissionTrax: Global Space Network

Date:Thursday 22^nd September 2011

Sydney,Australia

PlusComms Pty Limited based in Sydney,Australia has announced that it is building a Global Space Network (GSN) subject to financing. The project involves 3 x 30m dishes in key locations around the world. The Project,called MissionTrax could be operational by second quarter 2012.

The driver for the project has been to locate and save large dishes with a 30 year or more lifetime and bring them back to full service. Not only is this a very environmentally friendly approach,but it also has the added benefit of costing 1/10^th the price of building a new service with the same specifications. The first dish is located in California on the west coast of the USA. The site will be purchased and refurbished to operational standards,but it will be no longer used as a satellite “Earth station”. It will soon be part of a global network able to continuously track almost anything around the equatorial plane + or – 40 degrees. Although the coverage has yet to be tested at a range of frequencies,it is expected that missions as far away as Mars will have continuous coverage from Earth (excluding the rotation of Mars). The distance to Mars at the at the furthest point from Earth is 401 million km / 250 million miles – that is just under 3 Astronomical Units – or just under 3 times the distance from the earth to the sun. The three sites need to be on longitude that is 120 degrees from each other.

Manager of PlusComms,Robert Brand said “The extent of the coverage of course depends on the frequency being used and the power of the spacecraft. It is expected that communications with spacecraft near outer planets will also be part of the GSN’s capabilities but further testing will be done to confirm the overall performance of each dish and the complete network”.

“Modern satellite technology now allows dishes to be small and able to be placed in city locations. These older 30m dishes were built big to gather the weak signals and were located in “radio signal” quiet areas because the signals were hard to process. This makes these original workhorses redundant for tracking communications satellites,but perfect for building a GSN. Each GSN site will provide overlapping coverage of the previous site at a distance around 30,000 to 35,000km from the Earth’s surface (the blue circle in the attached diagram. These dishes were also built to a high tolerance and have specifications to over 15GHz. They are also Beam Wave Guide (BWG) dishes and thus the signal is beamed in a big tube right to the control room. This allows us to build a railway track to quickly disconnect and shunt in new equipment for different bands and capabilities. It is expected that it will take 45mins to connect and align a unit and 15 minutes to disconnect,allowing a one hour booking for a quick link with a spacecraft or rover / experiment on Mars or the Moon. The site will also provide full TT&C capability to fire engines and control satellites

In addition to the GSN capability,the US site will also be equipped as a large hosting centre for servers and other systems,with the ability to have individual partitions for companies. These sites were built to withstand a nearby blast from a nuclear bomb. With massive concrete walls the US site has amazing security and the ability to act as redundant site for most applications and secure the continued data operations of companies. The site already has fiber connectivity and plenty of room for more dishes. It is expected that this site will have multitenant uses.

“We would also like to return something to the global community and stimulate students by allowing automated access for basic Radio Telescope work when not booked for space tracking. We will employ automated systems via the Internet to explore the sky. The large dish may also be used for special events by other not for profit groups” Brand said. “The service will be headquartered in Sydney Australia. With the number of private space missions predicted to climb rapidly and a focus on the Moon and Mars,we expect a real growth in business over the next few years.”

Robert Brand’s background has seen him work in support of the Apollo program and nearly 100 NASA missions. He has worked at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia in support of ESA’s Giotto Mission to Halleys Comet and NASA’s Voyager encounters with Neptune and Uranus. He also received a certificate of Appreciation from NASA personally presented by Lunar Astronaut  John Young for support of STS-1 which he commanded. He also has worked at numerous Earth Stations in many countries and with the Echoes of Apollo Moon Bounce Project.  He is currently building an advanced tracking satellite.

Potential users of the facility should contact:

Robert Brand

robert.brand@pluscomms.com

+61 2 9559 2299 or +61 408 007 533

Sydney,Australia (GMT + 10 Hours)

www.pluscomms.com