The Mach 30 Guide to ISS Tracking (And Sharing It)

Oct 16 2015 by Greg Moran.

Example ground track of the ISS, from http://www.nasa.gov/

Did you know that the International Space Station (aka the ISS) typically flies over your head about a half dozen times every day? More importantly, did you know that you can actually see it happen with your naked eye?

Admittedly, you can’t always just look up and see it whizzing by. There are two reasons for this. The first is because the sky is too bright during the day. Second, during the night, all the Earth’s satellites are in its shadow. There are, however, two small windows each day in which it is possible to see the orbiting satellites flying overhead. These windows occur during the “terminator conditions”. Sadly, they have nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger. They do, however, have everything to do with the transition from day to night.

The “terminator line” is the region on Earth between daylight and night time. PHOTO CREDIT: Image by Norman Kuring, NASA GSFC, using data from the VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP.

A terminator, also called “twilight zone” or “gray line,” is a line that separates the day and night sides of a planet. In other words, “terminator conditions” simply mean sunrise and sunset. During these periods, the Earth’s satellites come out of the shadow and are able to reflect the sun’s light. Besides that, the sky is lit up just enough to make bright objects visible, but not so much that they’re drowned out.

The weather and sky conditions also play an important role in how well you are able to see the ISS as it flies over. Obviously, you won’t see anything if it’s cloudy, and you won’t want to go outside if it’s too cold. Therefore, you want to be smart and plan ahead. You can get a weather forecast anywhere, but “sky conditions” are a little harder to find. Sky conditions determine two things: cloud cover and the probability of rain. You also want to know the moon’s current phase because that affects how well you can see at night. You can check out the Sky Charts from Clear Dark Sky to make sure.

BlackfootCSK from http://www.cleardarksky.com/

Clear Sky Chart — Sample forecast of “seeing conditions” put out by http://www.cleardarksky.com/

Basically, there are three things you need for your ISS tracking project to be successful:

1.) Know when and where to look

2.) Use a recording device

3.) Post it online and tag Mach 30

Let’s dig a little deeper into the details, shall we?

1.) Know when and were to look. In general, just before dawn and just after dusk are the best times to look. Several websites will calculate the exact times for you, and most will also give you specific directions in which to look. Here are my personal favorites:

Heavens-Above. This site is the most technically accurate and computationally full featured. This is best if you are comfortable with tech and have a basic understanding of astronomy. Besides the ISS, it has a ton of other satellites that you can track.

NASA’s Spot the Station. Probably the most user-friendly option — it is NASA’s ISS after all, which means they have the best resources.

Satellite Flybys. Just enter your zip code and voila! It’s not the most accurate, but more than good enough to get you looking in the right direction.

ISS AstroViewer. Of all the sites on my list, this has the least features. It’s not very complicated, but it still tells you when and where to look. All you need is to input your city name.

2.) Use a recording device. Like we said, the ISS is usually bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, and therefore a decent quality camera or even some camera phones will be able to see it. Of course, the better the camera, the better the quality of pictures and video that you can get. If you can get your hands on an SLR camera and some good telephoto lens, even better. If your device allows it, use “low-light” or “nighttime” mode. If you’re using a DSLR or manual lenses, adjust your apertures, ISO settings, and exposures accordingly. Long exposure photographs will produce a “streak” as the ISS flies through the frame.

PHOTO CREDIT: Flickr user Paul Williams via Creative Commons

You’ll also want to use some kind of stationary object to steady your camera, like a tripod or luggage rack of a parked car. This is especially important when you’re using telephoto lens or low light settings, because your device will be much more sensitive to movement, and therefore more likely to blur. The more versatile the mount, the better. The ISS doesn’t hang around in any area for vary long, so get ready to readjust the field of view as the station moves across the sky.

Trust me, you’re going to get excited and want to gasp, and point, and do a little dance when you spot the iSS (or is that just me? No, it can’t be). So again, plan ahead and set the camera up early, leaving you to enjoy the event without worrying about messing up the shot.

3.) Post online. All that hard work and success deserves a little recognition, and we at Mach 30 would definitely love to see what you get. Just post it on your favorite social media site (or all of them, because why not), and tag us. Use @Mach_30 on Twitter, @Mach30 on Facebook, +Mach30 on Google+, Mach30-blog on Tumblr, and Mach 30 on YouTube. Then you can brag about your ISS tracking skills!

Have fun!

PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Moran, cerca 2010 in Dayton, OH via Creative Commons.

How could Open Source Hardware have helped Mark Watney?

Oct 6 2015 by Chris Sigman.

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As many of you probably are aware, the plot of the new movie The Martian is centered around Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney trying to survive on Mars long enough to be rescued after the other members of his expeditionary crew were forced to leave or be stranded. Mark, and later NASA, struggled to use the things that were left behind to keep him alive. All of the hardware, things like the rovers and life support systems, were portrayed as things that NASA designed and built themselves, and no one else had all the nitty gritty details about their design and function.

But what if even some of these things were Open Source, so that anyone in the world could look at the plans to build them? Or even better, build their own? In the movie, NASA and Mark did a heroic job of finding solutions to the problems, but if the hardware was all Open Source, engineers outside of NASA would have been able to aid them. Perhaps the nearly fatal explosion of the resupply mission wouldn’t have happened? Other engineers might have identified the flaws and brought them to NASA’s attention. Or perhaps the men and women at JPL would have been able to get more things done quicker, without so much stress and overtime, because of the larger community lending them their support.

Open Source Hardware isn’t a panacea to all problems, but it opens up a lot of opportunities that don’t exist when the designs live behind closed doors. Most things have been developed in this closed source way in the past. With incredibly complexly engineered things like rockets and habitats for Mars, the level of effort to make those things a reality creates a tremendous barrier for others to build on what’s already been done. If even some of these things that organizations like NASA build had their designs and build procedures open to the wider community, or even the public, to view, use, and build upon, the community can not only help each other out when there’s a problem, but build better solutions and accelerate the pace of progress.

BeagleSat

Oct 2 2015 by Chris Sigman.

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Several years ago when our president J was getting his PhD in rocket propulsion, he suggested the university look into using cheap, relatively easy to use programmable micro controllers like the Arduino for controlling small satellites like CubeSats. At the time, other micro controllers like the Beagle Bone Black (BBB) weren’t available.

Yesterday, J came across a Google Summer of Code project called BeagleSat, which is the same sort of idea that J had, to have an open source framework for building CubeSats.

Furthermore, if we were to do something like this today, we’d lean towards the BBB because of its power and versatility.

We’re very curious to see how far they can take this project. They published weekly status updates on their project web page, and it looks like there’s some cool work done, but also a lot more to do. We’re always happy to see documentation being reported on a regular basis, and it looks to us like this will be a great open source hardware project.

Apogee 2 In Review

Aug 5 2015 by Chris Sigman.

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First off, thank you everyone who attended Apogee 2 this year! From volunteers to people learning about Mach 30 for the first time, you all helped make it a success. The event went well, with new people getting a good deal of exposure to Mach 30 during our outreach event at NoVA Labs, and a lot of great planning work the following days at the board retreat. While this year’s event was different than last year’s, in a lot of ways it was the same. It was one part conference, one part public outreach, one part hackathon, and one part party. Apogee 2 still had something for everyone.

Apogee 2, Day 1 – Work Party and “bake-off” for 2 software development platforms.

Held in Arlington, VA at The Continental Condominium Skyview Conference and Party rooms, the event kicked off with a work party. The objective was to try out two software development platforms, Kivy and LiveCode, by developing a graphic user interface (GUI) for the Shepard Test Stand. We spent about 2 hours developing a pair of prototype GUIs using each of the platforms. We worked in a hackathon format and found that it’s a little too early for us to tell which one would be better to leverage. Kivy was perhaps quicker to develop back-end logic in, but LiveCode had a nice, easy to use interface for laying out things like buttons and other controls. We plan on looking into them both more!

We held our public outreach event, hosted by Nova Labs, on Saturday afternoon. It was a series of TEDx style presentations by the three Mach 30 Board members on the topics of Making, Spaceflight, and Open Source Development at Mach 30. In-between each session, attendees had the opportunity to talk with Mach 30 members and volunteers about the projects the organization works on, and generally socialize and pick our brains. It was great to see new faces, and spark some new ideas in other peoples minds. This was one of the most exciting parts of the conference for us.

Apogee2 State of the Organization and Volunteer Appreciation.

Saturday wrapped up with Mach 30’s president J. Simmons state of the organization address and Mach 30’s annual recognition event to honor the hard work of the volunteers. This year, we crowdsourced the nominations for the most noteworthy contributions, both team and individual. There was a lot of recognition to go around, and some themes that both volunteers and board members noticed. Coincidentally, J’s state of the org address touched on many of the same points. He ended the evening with a call to action for everyone associated with the organization to bring in one new person by Apogee III, next year. It would be a small thing for each individual to do, but it would mean a great deal to the organization – it would double our size, and extend our reach even farther.

Mach 30 Board Retreat Session

Apogee II continued with the annual Strategic Planning Board Retreat on Sunday and Monday. The board used these sessions to review Mach 30 activities including the Perigee II event last January, and to reflect on what the organization did and didn’t do well. This year the Board applied Agile methods during the retreat, continuing work started at Perigee II. Part of the reflection activity included identifying things we should do differently in the future. This retrospective was a very valuable exercise and we intend to do more of it. Our hope is to make planning and other board level activities more effective as we continue to adopt Agile methodologies.

Thank you again to everyone that helped make Apogee II a success, and special thanks to our Vice President, Greg Moran, for his hard work. He did most of the heavy lifting for planning the event, and it might not have happened had it not been for him.

Yavin Thruster Sprint 1

Jun 22 2015 by Chris Sigman.

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Mach 30 has started to use agile methodologies to manage its engineering projects, and the first of those to use an agile approach is the Yavin cold gas thruster. This last week, we completed our first sprint, and we’re all very pleased with the results.

For anyone that might not yet know about the project, it’s to develop a test stand connected to a source of pressurized gas, such as an air compressor, where different designs for the thruster can be tested. One of the aims for the project though is to develop and test new tools for future Mach 30 projects, such as CadQuery and our new Mathematics Tool Kit (MTK), a piece of software to make it easier to compile documentation around science and math proofs and analyses. We’re not only working to further develop these tools, but putting together a tool-chain for future design efforts. How this tool-chain works for Yavin is that we’re using MTK and a Python library to document and calculate aspects of the thruster such as wall thickness and nozzle shape. We can then create models with the same library in CadQuery, and export the model to be 3D printed.

In the first sprint, we took on 3 main items. The first of these was an export control review of the project, which can be found under the project’s Wiki on Open Design Engine. Second was a structural analysis of the gas chamber before the nozzle. The team generated a number of artifacts for this, including a document created with MTK detailing the analysis, a python library to support it, and an initial model created using CadQuery. You can see pictures of the model below, but the coolest part is that we printed it!

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This is just a proof of concept model though (it’s huge, and not an ideal size at all!). There’s a lot more work to be done! We have to produce another (or add to the existing) library to do the actual thruster design, and a number of other tasks. Some work to do to make it so that CadQuery supports all the functionality we’ll need for making a good performing nozzle, but we also have a number of tasks ahead focused around testing.

For transparency, there’s one more item we had planned on doing, and that was performing a test calibration on a volunteer’s 3D printer. Doing so helps us to build up information about how to calibrate other printers for printing future Yavin thruster nozzles. We don’t just intend for Mach 30 to print these, we intend for all sorts of people to do so, so we’re trying to make it as easy as possible on our end to print one of these.

We feel we accomplished a great deal for our first sprint, and we’re all very proud. If you care to hear more about our first sprint, you can check out our sprint review and retrospective here.

June 2015 Reports Hangout

Jun 18 2015 by Chris Sigman.

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This month, we continue our new round table discussion about what’s going on with Mach 30, as well as Space, Open Source Hardware, and the Maker Community. Mach 30 positions itself in the middle of these 3 communities, and this month we definitely talked about all of them. There’s space news, open source hardware community developments, and of course details about our ongoing efforts to make mankind a spacefairing civilization.

One of the big topics is the Yavin cold gas thruster, Mach 30’s Open Source Hardware project focused around the development of a number of tools and technologies that will enable not just greater projects here at Mach 30, but also in the Maker and OSHW communities at large. Another big topic is our upcoming Apogee II conference, our second yearly conference were we engage with the community about what we’re doing, what our plans are, and the community’s input and participation in that, from Space Enthusiast to Maker to Open Source Hardware fan. One particular point of note is our plans for doing a bake off of user interface development tools for projects, which are designed specifically with the maker community in mind.

There’s plenty more, so check out the ~30 minute video for more!

Many of these topics from this month will have periodic updates. Naturally they will be covered in the new and improved monthly reports hangouts at Mach 30, so subscribe to our YouTube channel to STAY TUNED!