6 items tagged “space”
2023
Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight (via) Absolutely beautiful piece of Soviet spacecraft engineering, explained in detail by Ken Shirriff.
2018
AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites. OK this is cool. “Instead of building your own ground station or entering in to a long-term contract, you can make use of AWS Ground Station on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. [...] You don’t need to build or maintain antennas, and can focus on your work or research. We’re starting out with a pair of ground stations today, and will have 12 in operation by mid-2019. Each ground station is associated with a particular AWS Region; the raw analog data from the satellite is processed by our modem digitizer into a data stream (in what is formally known as VITA 49 baseband or VITA 49 RF over IP data streams) and routed to an EC2 instance that is responsible for doing the signal processing to turn it into a byte stream.”
2010
Spacelog: space exploration stories from the original transcripts. The product of the most recent /dev/fort outing—a beautiful, web-native interface for browsing the NASA transcripts from the Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 missions (more to come). Every key moment has a URL.
2009
Stellarium. Really lovely open source planetarium application, for Linux, OS X and Windows.
2008
Interview @MarsPhoenix (via) “For over a year, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.”—an interview with the Twitter voice of the Mars Phoenix lander.
Preparing to rescue Hubble. The Big Picture has pictures of the preparations for next month’s Space Shuttle Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope for the last time, including a photo of astronauts practicing underwater.