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9:15 am
November 14, 2009
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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I don't know very much about radio technology at all (although I'm hoping I'll get to learn something through involvement in this project!), so perhaps my fears are misplaced: right now my main concern is what the antenna requirements will be for ground stations involved in communicating with the spacecraft. There seems to be no practical way for us to afford the gigantic dish installations that were involved in the Apollo missions. Are these strictly necessary? Would the ground station antenna requirements be lessened by relaying signals through an Earth orbiting satellite? Could we buy time on a commercial satellite for this purpose for less than the cost of building/renting a dish?
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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10:11 am
November 14, 2009
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brmj
| | Rochester, New York, United States | |
| Member | posts 402 | |
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I think radio technology has advanced considerably since the '60s and '70s, and the ground stations probably ought to be within the reach of a substantial fractionof radio hams. After all, amature radio enthusiests have been able to recieve data from Voyager 1, and it is much, much fartur away than the moon.
In any case, some of the Project Argus people may be willing to help out. Some of them operate dishes larger than the primary ones NASA used for the Apollo program, and it's not unusual for them to pick up fairly good signals from interplanitary probes.
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Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
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3:07 am
December 14, 2009
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squid
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Post edited 9:10 am – December 14, 2009 by squid
some universities would also have access to reasonable antenna arrays and equipment, so if we can get some of those involved then we may be able to use their equipment, at least temporarily.
the main problem is that we can't have a single station on earth unless you can somehow get the spaceship to launch and maintain a geostationary orbit (or close to it) all the way to the moon.
having a satellite relay would be prohibitly expensive, and again we would need at least 3 geostationary satellites to maintain full coverage.
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3:20 am
December 14, 2009
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Post edited 9:37 am – December 14, 2009 by Luke Maurits
squid said:
the main problem is that we can't have a single station on earth unless you can somehow get the spaceship to launch and maintain a geostationary orbit (or close to it) all the way to the moon.
Unfortunately, this would be impossible. The trip to the moon takes about 3 days with realistic propulsion abilities and is pretty much a straight line (if you look around the Navigation and Guidance Workgroup forums you can find some rough simulated trajectories). It will definitely be necessary to have stations on opposite sides of the globe. Hopefully by the time we are actually thinking about launching, we will have enough awareness and support that this can happen.
EDIT: Here's a link to those simulted trajectories.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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12:48 am
March 27, 2010
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Xyre
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I don't know how feasible it would be, but with the popularity of satellite tv/radio I would think it would be possible to build a transceiver for <$500. We could post these plans along with some software (Gnu Radio?) allowing members to setup the transceivers and connect them to the internet (think SETI but for communication too). This would allow use to build a distributed transceiver array similar to VLT that would be dedicated entirely to CSTART missions and given that we already have members in key locations (Australia, Europe, and North America), we could potentially have 24/7 contact.
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