These images are used by weather services all over the world to determine cloud cover, temperature etc. No more will be launched so when these three go belly up there will be no more live APT images (see notes at bottom).ĪPT refers to the ‘Automatic Picture Transmission’ protocol these satellites use to communicate images back to Earth. At present, 3 are operational NOAA-15, NOAA-18 and NOAA-19. The NOAA satellites orbit about once every 90 minutes, so each one passes over most of the Earth’s surface every day.Ī total of 19 NOAA satellites have been launched, with new ones replacing those which have become defunct. Since the 1960’s, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been repeatedly launching polar orbiting earth observation satellites.Ī ‘polar orbit’ is one which is perpendicular to the direction of Earth’s rotation ie, from pole to pole. There are loads of other tutorials from other people who have done this all over the internet so go ahead and read up on everyone else’s experience with this. This project can be done in an hour with no prior experience of electronics, radio or programming. A few weeks ago, I decided I had some free time and decided to have a go.
The ISEE-3 reboot was the first I heard of SDR, and I had been meaning to have a go at this sort of thing for months. This is called ‘software defined radio’ (SDR), and is exactly what the ISEEE-3 reboot team used to reboot the spacecraft. A radio receiver can now be replaced by software running on a sufficiently powerful computer. There is loads more info on that project in the links below. In short, when ISEE-3 was launched, you would need a huge amount of physical equipment to maintain radio communications with a spacecraft (or pretty much anything else for that matter). However, a team did race to put together the necessary kit and software to successfully ‘talk’ to ISEE-3 again during the flyby – amazing. It was discovered the craft was still functional but no one had the kit to communicate with it again. In short, an abandoned space probe launched in the 1970’s was due to return for a flyby of Earth. I’m in a space mood!Ībout 18 months ago I became a bit obsessed with the ISEE-3 reboot project. Spacex just landed a first stage booster for reuse. The laser projector was getting a bit boring so we’ll come back to that soon. Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll be hopefully posting a fair bit in the near future. It’s been ages since my last post – apologies for that, I’ve been busy moving house.
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