itgrrl – Australian Science

Space Open Day at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex

itgrrl — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:35:38 +0000

The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC), located on the rural outskirts of Canberra at Tidbinbilla, is one of only three NASA deep space tracking stations spread around the globe. On Sunday 18th August, as part of National Science Week they held their biennial ‘Space Open Day‘, affording a rare opportunity for visitors to tour areas of the facility that are normally off-limits to the public. My partner and I have recently joined the ranks of volunteers at CDSCC, and Space Open Day was to be our first outing in that role, along with a small team of new and long-time volunteers.

Our hour-long trek to the facility started bright and early (for a Sunday) in order to catch the volunteer briefing before the gates opened at 9am. Briefing done, it was time to head ‘front of house’ to greet the incoming visitors and attend to our rostered duties. Throughout the day, visitors were able to hop on a bus tour of the entire complex, join a guided walking tour of “the big dish” (DSS-43), and complete a self-guided walk to the dish for fantastic photo opportunities. In addition, the Visitor Centre displays, video presentations, and hands-on computer terminals were available as normal.

A CDSCC staff member explains the technology & history behind DSS-43 to a tour group on Space Open Day

Special talks were conducted throughout the day, with Education & Outreach Manager Glen Nagle first talking about CDSCC’s crucial role in the recent launch and landing of the Mars Science Laboratory, ‘Curiosity’, on Mars. CSIRO held a ‘Tweetup’ for the launch of Curiosity in November 2011, and a followup public event for the audacious landing in August the following year. (While guests were enthralled watching the Curiosity mission unfold, CDSCC staff were hard at work receiving telemetry and tracking data direct from the spacecraft and relaying it to Mission Control at NASA’s JPL in Pasadena, California.) Later in the day, Mike Dinn gave a talk on the Apollo missions. Mike was a technician at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station during the Apollo era, and it was a real treat for centre visitors to be able to hear about that iconic period of spaceflight from someone who actually worked on the missions.

Bus tours of the complex ran every 20 minutes for the entire day. Despite having a fleet of three buses on rotation, there was a queue for the tours all day—attendance for the day was just under 3,000 visitors, by far the largest turnout for any event at the complex. Operational staff from the centre volunteered their time to act as tour guides, providing behind-the-scenes insights into the ongoing and historical operations of the complex. The guided walking tours of the 70m dish, DSS-43, were also incredibly popular, with people happily queueing for over half an hour to hear about the engineering, technology, and history of the large dish and the whole complex. Again, current and former CDSCC staff were on hand to provide a wealth of technical information.

Adding to the excitement for the young geeks-in-training visiting CDSCC on the day were special appearances by a number of representatives from the Galactic Empire, who assured us that they were on a “routine inspection tour” of the facility. I do believe that they consider the Communication Complex to be an Empire outpost under their control—and I wasn’t about to be the one to risk contradicting them! In all seriousness though, the members of the 501st Legion who attended were fantastic, and continued the long tradition of science fiction helping to inspire the next generation of real-world scientists and engineers.

Darth Nihilus, Imperial officers & Stormtrooper from the 501st Legion NSW/ACT Garrison survey their ‘outpost’

Glen Nagle and his small team (Korinne McDonnell and Leanne George) run the CDSCC Visitor Centre—which is open 364 days of the year—as well as all of the Education and Outreach programmes on a modest budget. That they were able to promote and smoothly stage an event that proved to be wildly popular with the public is a testament to their passion and dedication to the mission of CDSCC and to science communication and outreach in general.

For myself and the other volunteers, the day was quite tiring but immensely enjoyable. How often do you get a chance to take people on tours of a deep space tracking station, and spend time chatting to members of the public about robotic and human spaceflight, physics and astrophysics, cosmology, and radio astronomy? I’m sure that there are some people for whom that sounds like a painful day, but for myself and the other volunteers it was pretty close to Nerdvana.

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You can follow the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex on Twitter: @CanberraDSN

Full disclosure: Jessica is a volunteer at the CDSCC

Cite this article:
Smith J (2013-08-23 00:35:38). Space Open Day at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 29, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/space/space-open-day-at-the-canberra-deep-space-communication-complex/

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ArduSat: Kickstarting a new era in space education

itgrrl — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 08:03:41 +0000

I was awake at stupid o’clock last Sunday morning to watch NASA’s livestream of the launch of the HTV-4 resupply vehicle. At precisely 05:48:46AM AEST, JAXA H-IIB F4 launch vehicle lifted off smoothly en route to resupply the International Space Station (ISS). The 5.4 tonne payload comprised all the usual suspects: water, replacement and upgraded electronics for various ISS systems, spares for major station components, and new equipment and supplies for experiments.

Nestled in amongst the other cargo were four tiny ‘CubeSats’, two of which were funded by a Kickstarter project: ArduSat. These tiny satellites are the first example of crowdfunded space operations, and represent an exciting new development in the recent popularisation of ‘citizen science’.

Commercial satellite launches are immensely expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars using current rocket-based technology. The idea behind the ArduSat project is to provide low-cost access to real, orbiting satellites to students and space enthusiasts. By designing payloads small enough to fit into gaps in the main cargo area, innovative satellite operators are able to hitch a ride on commercial space launches at a fraction of the cost. The dramatic cost reduction has finally made it viable to create an orbiting educational platform, a remarkable achievement.

The two crowd-funded cubesats, ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X, really are tiny—just 10 x 10 x 10cm and weighing only 1kg each. But their size is deceptive. Each satellite not only has its own flight stabilisation systems, but also incorporates a camera, an impressive suite of sensors (see list below), and 16 fully-functional Arduino-based computers. Each of those computing modules is capable of running experiments either independently or in concert with multiple other modules. The ‘experiments’ that can be run are essentially computer programs which can access data from the onboard sensors.

It is the onboard Arduino computers from which the ArduSats take their name. Arduino is a popular open source computing platform designed for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and professionals who use the ‘computer on a board’ platform to build everything from retro video game consoles, to home automation systems, through to… orbital experiment platforms! The ArduSat project is a global collaboration. NanoSatisfi is the company that was formed to create the Kickstarter project, and is headquartered in San Francisco. The main ArduSat Payload Processor Module (pictured below) was designed by Australian Aurduino guru, Jonathan Oxer, who I talked to after the launch. Jonathan co-authored the popular how-to book, Practical Arduino, and has subsequently founded Freetronics, a Melbourne-based company specialising in designing and producing Arduino-based boards, kits, and components.

: The ArduSat payload processor module. [Image credit: Jonathan Oxer]

Arduino is open source hardware, which means that it is explicitly intended to be assembled, disassembled, studied, understood, and built upon. At the most basic level, people are able to build their own Arduino-compatible boards from common electronics components. Pre-built Arduino and Arduino-compatible boards are also available for under $50, allowing experimenters to get started at incredibly low cost even if they don’t wish to build the boards themselves. The effective removal of the entry barrier means that Arduino has made physical computing far more widely accessible than ever before.

The extremely low cost of building and launching the ArduSats creates an exciting opportunity for science education and outreach. Schools around the world are able to purchase experiment time on the satellites for only $300 for a full week of access. As Jonathan put it, “That’s an amazing price-point compared to anything previously available, and it makes it attainable even to individuals and small groups. A typical science class could run a bake sale, raise $10 per student, and then run their own experiments in space for a week!

Cite this article:
Smith J (2013-08-09 08:03:41). ArduSat: Kickstarting a new era in space education. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 29, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/space/ardusat-kickstarting-a-new-era-in-space-education/

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Linux.conf.au 2013: ‘Nerdvana’ in Canberra

itgrrl — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:26:36 +0000

During the last week of January, approximately 700 IT professionals and enthusiastic hobbyists descended on Canberra to jointly create an intensive learning experience. Each year the call goes out across the intertubes to gather together open source geeks for Linux Conference Australia. Linux.conf.au, or simply LCA, is one of the largest open source conferences in the southern hemisphere, and one of the most highly-regarded conferences of its kind in the world. I was excited to attend LCA2013, as it was my first LinuxConf, despite being involved to a modest degree in the Linux and open source community for at least the last 15 years.

Most days, the programme commenced with a keynote address by an IT industry luminary who had made a significant contribution to computer technology and open source. At every keynote address, the lower level of ANU’s Llewellyn Hall was packed with delegates, each toting a selection of wifi- or 3G-enabled devices. While I saw a healthy 55Mbps idle capacity on the Internet link provided by conference organisers (ably assisted by the network engineers at AARNET), once the assembled cohort of digital natives hit the link, all of that that capacity was rapidly utilised.

The conference was opened on the Monday by Bdale Garbee, recently-retired Open Source & Linux Chief Technologiest at Hewlett-Packard, and a long-time contributor to the Debian Linux distribution. (Read Kelly Burnes’ article about Bdale at LCA2013, where you can also watch our video interview.)

On the Tuesday, Radia Perlman enchanted the audience with her talk on the folklore of networking. Radia has been instrumental in developing several key networking protocols that underpin the interconnectedness of computers that we now take for granted. She gave a highly-technical yet accessible talk laced with humour and even nerdy poetry. (You can read my thoughts on Radia at LCA2013, and watch our video interview.)

Andrew “bunnie

Cite this article:
Smith J (2013-02-11 00:26:36). Linux.conf.au 2013: 'Nerdvana' in Canberra. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 29, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/internet-2/linux-conf-au-2013-canberra/

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Radia Perlman at LCA 2013

itgrrl — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:48:19 +0000

A little before 9am on Tuesday 29th January, I filed into ANU’s Llewellyn Hall along with approximately 700 other Linux.conf.au delegates to listen to the daily keynote speech. I’m now a little embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Radia Perlman. A little over an hour later, I was a fangirl.

Radia delivered an engaging, funny, and highly-technical keynote address at LCA2013, and the audience of IT professionals and enthusiasts present lapped it up. In it, she placed the technical details of the network protocols she and her colleagues developed in an historical context. She half-jokingly explained that this was the only way in which anyone could hope to understand why the protocols we work with today include ‘features’ in their design that would otherwise seem crazy to an outside observer.

In delivering her keynote, Radia gave us not just the technical detail behind the development of networking protocols, but also wove in details from her creative side, as well as tidbits about her children’s involvement in her technical life. The crowd was delighted as Radia shared with us the poem that she created (an ‘Algorhyme’) shortly after devising the Spanning Tree Protocol in 1985 while at DEC. For as she says, “Every algorithm deserves an algorhyme…” (You can hear Radia reciting her AlgoRhyme in Dan’s video interview with Radia below, and read the text here.) There is also a recording of Radia’s daughter, Dawn Perlner, singing the Algorhyme set to music by Radia’s son, Ray Perlner. Radia also mentioned her son Ray’s involvement in the creation of an AlgoRhyme V2 to mark the creation of her most recent network protocol, TRILL.

Later in the week, I had the pleasure of heading off to lunch with Radia and a small group of fellow delegates during a break in technical sessions. She is engaging and thoughtful, and concerned as much with solutions for societal issues as solutions for thorny networking challenges. Radia is eternally self-effacing, and repeatedly claimed that she had “never done anything difficult

Cite this article:
Smith J (2013-02-06 21:48:19). Radia Perlman at LCA 2013. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 29, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/interviews/radia-perlman-at-lca-2013/

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