Pan-STARRS asteroid search campaign
The Pan-STARRS asteroid search campaign starts on Monday 17th November and ends on Monday 17th December 2012.
The International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC=”Isaac”) works with the University of Hawaii to use the PS1 telescope on Haleakala to offer the Pan-STARRS Asteroid Search Campaign and they do this twice a year. The PS1 telescope is 1.8-m and produces images that are 7-degrees in size and with 1.4 billion pixels. IASC partitions these enormous images into 208 sub-images that are distributed to various teams.
For more information about Pan-STARRS you can check http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/.
The Pan-STARRS Campaign pairs universities (or teams). The UKSEDS Asteroid Chasers will be paired with another group from elsewhere in the world (TBC). Each week for the five weeks of the campaign, the team will receive 6-8 image sets to analyse.
SGAC “Find An Asteroid” search campaign
The Space Generation Advisory Council is partnering with the IASC for a SGAC Search Campaign, called “Find An Asteroid”. Thanks to some enthusiastic UKSEDS members, UKSEDS has been selected by SGAC to be one of 15 teams from around the world to participate in this campaign. Between 14th August to 18th September, they will collaborate as a research team via the internet, submitting a single MPC (Minor Planet Center) report to IASC on each of the image sets that they get during a week.
The campaign participants come from countries as diverse as: Iran, India, US, Germany, Puerto Rico, Canada, France, Vietnam, UK, Australia, Nepal, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Russia, Portugal, Bolivia, Romania, Kuwait, Italy and Saudi-Arabia. They form national, regional or international teams.
Many thanks to: Ranji Gogoi, Sophie Lynn Williams, Yusef George Stylianou, Richard Painter and Ryan Laird for their successful applications.
Best of luck to the team!
For further information, please visit:
http://spacegeneration.org/index.php/eventstopics/news/641-15-teams-selected-for-the-sgac-neo-working-groups-find-an-asteroid-search-campaign
E-mail: [email protected] for more information.
The first Bristol SEDS project was inspired by the increasing number of amatuer high altitude balloon (HAB) missions. It was hard not to find the images of the Earth recorded on these missions inspirational and it was decided that a HAB project with a scientific mission would be ideal.
The first intake consisted of 2 postgraduate and 6 undergraduate physics students all of which had a keen interest in space. To help organise the group Jim Sadler acted as Bristol SEDS project coordinator, whilst Hannah Price took up the role of team leader. Hannah had a keen interest in the mechanism of cloud formation, and as team leader set the scientific goal to recover cloud nucleation particles from the upper troposphere.
The balloon launched on the 13th August 2011 from the EARS launch site. However, soon after lift-off the onboard tracking failed and the mission was looking lost. Fortunately, as this was our first launch and we anticipated some teething problems Steve Randal of UKHAS who was helping with the launch had provided a backup tracker which worked perfectly throughout the flight. The balloon reached a peak altitude of 21km before the envelope burst and the payload returned to Earth under parachute. The flight profile of the balloon can be seen in figure 8.
Figure 8 – Flight profile of the DUST payload.
After a long chase the launch team eventually found the payload sitting in a farmers field undamaged. Upon returning to the lab the images and samples from the payload were collected. The payload had been equiped with a single digital camera set to record an image every 30 seconds. A selection of the images recorded near apogee can be seen in figure 9 and figure 10.
Figure 9 – Edge of the atmosphere image taken by the DUST project.
Figure 10 – Edge of the atmosphere image taken by the DUST project.
To analyse the solid sample collected from the upper troposphere a technique called EDX was used. This showed a collection of small particulate right on the edge of the microscopes imaging capability. However, even though the particles were small, material classification could still be carried out and they were found to consist of silicon dioxide.
This work was funded by a grants from the Nexus IoP student branch, the Royal Meterological Society, the Aerosol Society, and the generous donation of an mbed microcontroller from mbed. A complete report can be found at the following links:
DUST Mission & Report
Aerosol Society Report
Nexus Report
https://ukseds.org/chaos_dust_report/
http://www.iopblog.org/bristol-balloon-launch/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Npbv93YIo/
Team Leader – H Price
You are invited to participate in an international astronomy programme called GLOBE at Night. You can join students from 115 countries around the world by measuring light pollution effects in your area. UKSEDS is planning on getting a team together for the February campaign. E-mail: [email protected] if you are interested to join our team.
GLOBE at Night is free. It is easy for you and your students to participate. For complete information, check it out online at www.globeatnight.org. The following gives you additional information about the programme.
Join the Worldwide GLOBE at Night 2013 Campaign!
What would it be like without stars at night? What is it we lose? Starry night skies have given us poetry, art, music and the wonder to explore. A bright night sky (a.k.a. light pollution) affects energy consumption, health online pharmacy and wildlife too.
Spend a few minutes to help scientists by measuring the brightness of your night sky. Join the GLOBE at Night citizen-science campaign (www.globeatnight.org). The first campaign started on January 3 and ran through January 12. We plan on setting up a team for the second campaign.
More information:
GLOBE at Night is a worldwide, hands-on science and education program to encourage citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of their night sky. During five select sets of dates in 2013, children and adults match the appearance of a constellation (Orion or Leo in the northern hemisphere, and Orion and Crux in the southern hemisphere) with seven star charts of progressively fainter stars (www.globeatnight.org/observe_magnitude_orion.html).
Participants then submit their choice of star chart at www.globeatnight.org/webapp/ with their date, time and location. This can be done by computer (after the measurement) or by smart phone or pad (during the measurement). From these data an interactive map of all worldwide observations is created (www.globeatnight.org/map/)
Over the past 7 years of 10-day campaigns, people in 115 countries have contributed over 83,000 measurements, making GLOBE at Night the most successful, light pollution citizen-science campaign to date (www.globeatnight.org/analyze.html).
The GLOBE at Night website is easy to use, comprehensive, and holds an abundance of background information www.globeatnight.org/learn.html and www.globeatnight.org/observe.html. Guides, activities, one-page flyers and postcards advertising the campaign are available at www.globeatnight.org/pdf/. Through GLOBE at Night, students, teachers, parents and community members are amassing a data set from which they can explore the nature of light pollution locally and across the globe.
There are 5 GLOBE at Night campaigns in 2013: January 3 – 12, January 31 – February 9, March 3 – 12, March 31 – April 9, and April 29 – May 8. Make a difference and join the GLOBE at Night campaign.
Listen to a fun skit on GLOBE at Night in a 7-minute audio podcast at http://365daysofastronomy.org/2012/12/17/december-17th-the-dark-skies-crusader-retires-globe-at-night-returns/
You can visit GLOBE at Night on the Web: www.globeatnight.org
For Facebook: www.facebook.com/GLOBEatNight
For Twitter: twitter.com/GLOBEatNight
Subscribe to mailing list for updates: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected] if you are interested in joining our team.
PoleCATS, Conceptual And Tiny Spectrometer, a miniaturised plasma analyser was developed at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, by a UKSEDS team from universities all around the country. The project is one of many in the REXUS (Rocket EXperiments for University Students) program which allows students from universities across Europe to carry out scientific and technological experiments on European Space Agency research sounding rockets. PoleCATS was selected in December 2011 for flight in May 2013. Full details of the project can be found on the team’s website.
SUSat was a mission to design, build and eventually launch the University of Southampton’s first ever satellite, a CubeSat named SUSat (Southampton University Satellite), the first Open CubeSat affiliated project.
2010 Annual report
The following report sets out the requirements for a payload instrument, which is a technology demonstrator to realise the potential of using the Moon for vicarious calibration of Earth facing sensors. By studying the previous report, the project is also able to continue work on the Power (EPS), Attitude Determination and Control (ADCS) and On-Board Computing (OBC) subsystems, with the designs being developed, manufactured and tested.
The EPS has been successfully manufactured and tested on an actual sized PCB. The attitude determination and control system was defined and a preliminary analysis of all areas was completed with some hardware also being developed. An on-board computer has been purchased and associated peripheral hardware and software designed, to allow it to both control SUSat and transfer data.
The final aim of this year’s contributions to the project was to control the ADCS with the OBC whilst being powered by the EPS, and a prototype was successfully demonstrated. Recommendations for future work include designing and manufacturing the payload, developing the subsystems further and submitting a proposal to the next ESA CubeSat workshop to secure a free launch on the Vega launch vehicle.
OPEN DESIGNS SUSat OBC, 2010 University of Southampton downloads: |