Es ist wieder Zeit sich mit Funk zu beschäftigen und dieses mal mit mehr Raumfahrt.
Daher rufen wir nun die „FunkWoche 2018/2 und ESA’s European Spacetalks – Raumfahrt und noch mehr Funk“ aus.
Das Konzept ist wie letztes mal, dass wir jeden Tag in dieser Woche an Funkthemen arbeiten, reden, diskutieren, auslegen, oder anderweitig kreativ umsetzen werden. Und mit „wir“ meinen wir auch euch!. Mögliche Themen sammeln wir bereits hier[0] und Uwe und ich werden eine Motorsteuerung aus Aliexpressteilen bauen, mit der wir Satelliten verfolgen und damit kommunizieren wollen. Wir laden euch ein dabei mitzumachen!
Dazu passend werden wir ESA’s European Spacetalks[0] nach Jena holen und kurze Vorträge über Raumfahrt halten.
Spacetalks sind so: „We are all concerned by space activities because they make a difference to our lives on a daily basis and correspond to one of humanity’s greatest challenges. In November 2018, members of the European Space family will be sharing their passion in a series of talks presenting a vast array of space-related topics.“Zur zeit sind es Europaweit 170 Talks, und wir sind dabei. Ihr seht also, jeder kann, soll und darf da mitmachen!
We worked on the Planetary Navigation and Sensor System.
There is no GPS around Mars, so rovers, sensors and even astronauts need to be located differently.
Our PlaNS will solve this problem with a ground based positioning system. During normal data transmission from the sensor on the rover, or inside the Astronauts space suits, the PlaNS connects to it and constantly tracks the rover and determines its position inside the habitat.
So the rover can get lost in a crater and losing connection to the habitat, but the last location is known, so the rover can be recovered and also no Astronaut like Mark Watney will be left on Mars again.
Nothing and no one will be left behind on any planet with our PlaNS, even today
Localizing and never loosing any sensor, rover and Astronaut on Mars without a GPS! PlaNS shall create a hybrid data and localizing sensor network, and also serve as a personal tracking aid for astronauts during extra base activities.
The Problem
During the current phase of Mars exploration it is difficult to position rovers and other assets on Mars because there are no Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) like GPS, Galileo, Glonass or Beidou in Martian Orbits and thus all rovers must rely on inertial measurement units (IMUs) for their relative position. Over time, the measured position can deviate from the real position and summing up over a long time. This poses a possible danger when the rover can drive into a creater because it calculated its position still outside the crater.
Now imagine Astronauts on Mars losing a team mate because they don’t know his/her last position! There is currently no other GNSS like system on Mars and the installation of a 12+ satellite system offering a global positioning system for Mars won’t take place during the first exploration phases due to budgiting and infrastructure reasons.
The Solution
Our solution includes a scalable approach based on a mobile antenna array system that is synchronized via a central time source from the base habitat (via wires or wireless) and localizing the position of any signal by its nominal and permanent transmission to the antennas.
The antenna system will grow with its tasks. It will start with 5-6 antennas near the first landing site’s habitat and can be place within walking distance and then to nearby elevated landmarks like mountains or crater rims. With each new habitat module, the antenna grid is expanded and the coverage zone of sensor data transmission and positioning will be expanded.
Even with a Martian GPS at one point, the PlaNS system can serve as an additional or redundant terrestrial communication and localisation system.
The Technical Approach
Our system can be realized by current, state of the art technologies. We decided for a rapid prototype appraoch by using Software Defined Radio receiver sticks serving as receivers at each antenna array’s groundstation and using two transmitters on ISM and PWM bands simulating the sensors and Astronauts transceivers.
Our appraoch also includes timesynching on the same transmitting channel as the sensors and Astronauts. Due to the fact that the relative positions of the antenna array ground stations and also the position of the central time synching transmitter are known, one time synching pulse can be used at all stations for synching their local system times. With this, a Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) can be achieved with each incoming signal from sensors and Astronauts.
Future
Only the sampling rate of the receivers will limit the accuracy of the system. With our „cheap“ demonstrators, samplingrate is 2MHz and thus the distance the electro-magnetic wave is travelling will be about 150 meters. Our system will give rough directions but for less than 50€ per ground station. More suffisticated SDR receivers like HackRF or LimeSDR will improve the accuracy.
The team decided to keep on working on PlaNS because it is also relevant for further Planets and Moons, but mainly on Earth. A mobile search and rescue system for hikers in areas with deep valleys blocking the GNSS reception will speed up the localization, bringing the rescue team earlier to the accident area and thus saving lifes!
Status
We are currently working on the analysis of our measuring test during the Space Apps 2018 Hackathon.
The PlaNS system is part of the Distributed Ground Station Network (DGSN) where a similar approach is used to track cubesats and other satellites in orbit. So PlaNS is a natural extension of DGSN and will be worked on with the community and also during future Google Summer of Code campaigns.
For the fifth time your team of engineers, hackers, makers and artists will solve global problems during the biggest hackathon event on this planet (20. & 21. October 2018) and you have the possibility to join!
During the last space apps, the Stuttgart teams were regularly among the final 25 projects out of 900 projects in various categories. For this year’s open-source topics NASA selected challenges all about “Earth and Space”.
Please register for Stuttgart today[0] to be part of this great space community, find your challenge to tackle, win awesome prizes and maybe start your space start-up.
Take this chance. NASA will bring together more than 20000 people at more than 200 locations and your project could make a change!
Again for the 4th time, AerospaceResearch.net[0] is proud to be selected as an official mentoring organization for the Summer of Code 2018 (GSOC) program run by Google[1].
And we are now looking for students to spend their summers coding on great open-source space software, getting paid up to 6600 USD by Google, releasing scientific papers about their projects and supporting the open-source space community.
Until 27. March 2018, students can apply for an hands on experience with applied space programs. As an umbrella organisation, AerospaceResearch.net and KSat-Stuttgart e.V. are offering you various coding ideas[2] to work on:
The Distributed Ground Station Network – global tracking and communication with small-satellites[2][4]
KSat-Stuttgart – the small satellite society at the Institute of Space Systems / University of Stuttgart[2]
It is time again for Hacktoberfest and we already took part in it with our projects. On the 7th of October, we joined people in shackspace, Stuttgart to work on open-source projects by creating pull-requests.
The goal Hacktoberfest was and still is to that everyone creates at least 4 pull-requests by adding new features or fixing bugs to the software projects and earning a free and limited edition T-shirt by doing so. We did so with 2 projects already…
Seit April 2016 züchten wir so automatisch wie möglich Pflanzen. Erst Kresse inzwischen auch Phacelia und später vielleicht Gänseblümchen. Verwendet wurden hierbei alte RaspberryPIs, IKEA-Samla-Boxen und Sensoren, die noch in unseren Projekt-Boxen schlummerten. Nach über 100 Wachstumszyklen (vom Sähen bis „Ernten“) haben wir einige Fails erlebt: Schimmel (diverse), zu viel Wasser, zu wenig Wasser, Sensordefekte, Internetausfälle und menschliche Unachtsamkeit. Es wurden über 400000 Photos und über 2 Millionen Sensorwerte gespeichert. Um den fehleranfälligsten und wichtigsten Sensor (Wasserstand in der Box) zu ersetzen wurden Classifier trainiert. (Tensorflow, Convolutional-Neural-Network) Wir würden euch gerne von unseren Erfahrungen berichten.
Am Samstag den 05. August 2017 treffen sich horn und mfa und werden per Mobcoding einen offenen Webserver-Workshop für Dateiupload-Dinge machen. Es geht um 19:00 Uhr los und ist spätestens 21:00 Uhr vorbei mit:
Thema: Einen Webserver in Flask schreiben, der Dateiuploads annimmt. Dieses Problem wollen sicherlich viele auch für viele andere Dinge lösen.
Ziele:
Dateien von horns Bodenstationen annehmen und abspeichern, oder eure Dateien annehmen und abspeichern.
So einfacher Code wie möglich / Aber mit Tests!
auch den Client mit Requests werden wir abdecken
spätere Termine möglich: Hosting mit gunicorn; mehr asnyc via aiohttp
Wie:
Mobcoding (horn tippt am Projektor und alle andere machen mit und jeder lernt dabei).
Only one month left until SpaceUp Stuttgart, your space unconference. Register today, reserve your participation slot and you will be in good company in the Raumfahrtzentrum Baden-Württemberg (RZBW). In addition to the initial lineup with Prof. Reinhold Ewald (German ESA-astronaut), the Space Station Design Workshop (SSDW) and diverse space organisations from Stuttgart, so far we find new participants from the following companies and organisations and fascinating questions on our filling list…
Astronauts Bonnie Dunbar (NASA) and Ernst Messerschmid (DLR)
Airbus Defence and Space
REXUS-Projects PATHOS & DAEDALUS from Würzburg
Neurons in Space from Hohenheim
Max-Planck-Institute
How do we suit up for mars?
More…
and Yours!
At SpaceUp Stuttgart, everyone is a participant. If you have a space project, present it here, discuss it with everyone and expand your network. And if you always wanted to fly a spaceship, here is your chance to control the Sojuz Simulator and dock it to the International Space Station.
Don’t miss this opportunity to be active in space. Register today on www.SpaceUp.org/Stuttgart, find more information to share here.
We are looking forward to welcome you to SpaceUp Suttgart, 23.07.2017,
We are very happy to anounce our two Space Apps Stuttgart 2017 winning projects Tunnel-God-Detector and Whata. And Whata needs your voting support for the People’s Choice Award of the world’s biggest global hackathon!
(go to the voting page daily, search for „Whata“, Click on „vote“ and hold it until it says „voted“, that’s it, thank you! 🙂 )
During last weekend’s NASA hackathon, those two teams worked on solving global problems under this year’s theme „Earh Observation“. They tackled two different challenges and came up with excellent open-source solutions utilizing space data and create something new to help people. They both earned the global nominations and we wish them good luck in the final round where they compete against more than 1000 projects created by 20,000 people.
Please consider voting for Whata starting from 8th until 21th of May because each daily vote counts! If you like, join their teams and work together on their open-source projects.
The Whata team worked on „Where’s the Water?“ to use satellite and other data to allow farmers, landowners, and land managers in your locale to identify and visualize water resources in their surroundings. They’d like to help people find reliable water sources. They came up with providing the means with low-cost, easy-to-fabricate sensors, open-data, and existing govermental data.
For the fourth time, the NASA Space Apps hackathon weekend returns to Stuttgart! Sign up now to participate in the biggest hackathon event on this planet (29. & 30. April 2017). Stuttgart is one of the biggest and most important aerospace regions in Germany and we are very proud to grow and support the local space industry and startup scene with this open-source space event for everyone!
Space Apps is an international hackathon that occurs over 48 hours in cities around the world. Because of citizens like you, we continue to grow each year. If you haven’t already, join us to share ideas and engage with open data to address real-world problems, on Earth and in space. Work alone or with a team to solve challenges that could help change the world. And everybody can help, diverse backgrounds (software developers, engineers, artists, journalists, hackers, makers,…) will provide unique solutions to global problems that nobody thought about before. Check back here to join Space Apps in the Stuttgart hackerspace shackspace.
Space Apps Stuttgart 2017 Hackathon Weekend (29/30.04.2017):
start 29.04.2017 opening 11:00 CEST, launching event 13:00 CEST, coming later is okay
end 30.04.2017 18:00 CEST
in shackspace, Stuttgarter Hackerspace (Ulmer Str. 255, Stuttgart-Wangen)
Only one month left until 