ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone
kickstarter.comThis seems mostly to be a PR gimmick. While it seems like a cool thing to do "just because we can", there is no compelling advantage to putting a 200mm telescope in space. You don't get much sharper images by being in space with such a small aperture. And launching a space telescope for people to take pictures of themselves... I don't even know where to start.
The purpose of the Arkyd is to discover NEOs. Right now there are no low-cost, mass-produced telescopes in LEO, and asteroid discovery is driven by government-funded projects centered around universities. The compelling advantage of this telescope is that it circumvents the cost and bureaucracy necessary to discover asteroids.
Of course, the kickstarter/public relations aspect is not essential to all this, but Planetary Resources gets a ton of public interest and they want to capitalize on/engage with people who are interested in their mission to mine asteroids.
Did you hear about b612 foundation? they also want to discover NEOs with a space telescope, and they don't want to do it for business purposes. last time I've checked they said it's going to cost about $450m to do it. There is no chance that PR will be able to do it much cheaper. They may be able to launch their toy and snap some pictures but I don't think they will be able to do much more with it.
B612 wants to make a big telescope and put it in an orbit very far from Earth. PR's approach is different - make many small, cheap Arkyd telescopes and take advantage of economies of scale. They don't want to concentrate resources and risk in a single large object.
Building a small satellite is quite affordable, but commercial launch costs are a problem. There are several funded kickstarter projects whose goal is to deploy one or more satellites in orbit for much cheaper than what PR is trying to raise.
People also overestimate the difficulty of finding asteroids. Asteroids are still being discovered by amateur astronomers on Earth. It's estimated that there are millions of undiscovered objects. A big space telescope is an advantage but not a requirement.
other kickstarter projects:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/880837561/skycube-the-first-satellite-launched-by-you http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-experiment-in-space http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space
I asked an astronomer friend of mine to look at the specs and got a small list of advantages:
-No atmosphere. Seeing would still be a considerable factor; getting 1 arcsecond resolution on Earth is not easy.
-No clouds
-Ability to focus on the same object for an extended exposure
-Infrared
-Can look north and south
There are a lot of advantages to this, even with their aperture size.
Actually, not infrared but UV. They seem to have filters in the vacuum-UV which can't be observed from the ground. The near-IR out to 1.1um that they are going out to is not really a problem from the ground.
Honest question: Is it possible that they're not worried about sharper images of distant objects insomuch as being able to survey much larger portions of the sky with a large array of satellites?
The compelling advantage is that they're making it available to the public to use.
If you add up the total time the telescope will be available to the public in minutes (please, correct me if I'm wrong) you get:
30 * 1000 + 3 * 30 * 500 + 3 * 30 * 500 + 10 * 30 * 100 + 25 * 30 * 50 + 25 * 30 * 50 = 225000 minutes = 156.25 days
This is not really a lot. The remaining time will be used by Planetary Resources. There is no way for public to continue using the telescope after that.
Assuming this is where they stop, and they don't build a system for purchasing time later on...
But what I'm saying is the public can just get a 200mm telescope on the ground themselves. No need to launch it into space.
I live in Portland, Oregon. Every time we wanted to use a telescope to see some planetary wonder it has been cloudy. Hard to keep my kids excited about space without seeing much of it :)
You can rent time on a telescope in another hemisphere and timezone right now, over the Internet.
Atmospheric interference makes it impossible to observe in some wavelengths on the ground.
The public is already allowed to use the Hubble. You just have to send a proposal that is compelling enough for them to grant you time on the scope.
Do you really think that they will be able to upload a picture, display it on a LCD, snap picture of their setup and send it back to Earth and do it hundred of times with a prototype full of untested tech?
Yes.
a) The vast majority of satellites are "prototypes." They're built a few at a time, extensively tested, then launched. In the case of satellite frameworks like Cubesat, they're open source and tested every time someone launches one.
b) This is not untested tech, at all. Cubesats have been using consumer technology in satellites extensively, both by startups, hobbyists, and academia (doing advanced stuff like orbital reconfiguration, atmospheric sampling, telecommunications, etc). Combined with NASA's existing suppliers for aerospace grade components, these satellites which have a really high success rate.
Cubesats don't use LCDs. mainly because LCD won't work under low temp conditions, so that's problem number one. Problem number two - we don't know how Arkyd will be propelled. They are selling possibility to point the telescope anywhere but what about changing it's direction? How many maneuvers they can do with limited amount of propellant on board? There is more questions, but really what's the point?
LCD temperature specs are for ATP, where heat transfer functions very differently from vacuum. With radiation being the only way energy enters or leaves the satellite's thermal system, all the satellite has to do is heat the LCD faster than it is radiating heat. This is the case for most instrumentation on satellites and thermal is one of the most important and well understood systems.
Colloid thrusters (or other ionic propulsion), or even a chemical hybergolic propellant (hydrazine + oxygen for example) would work perfectly for propulsion. This is a solved problem, so much so that there are off the shelf modules for cubesat propulsion.
Probably the most awesome Kickstarter I've ever backed. I'm so excited!!! Planetary Resources is a really cool company.
I'm worried that they are doing any sort of crowd-funding.
The biggest risk of Planetary Resources is that it turns out to be a scam, either accidentally or on purpose.[1]
I think PR could have amazing results for humanity even if the company itself doesn't work out well, so I don't want to sound too negative here.
[1] An accidental scam, in my words, would be something that would never ever work, but they didn't worry too much about it because they were spending someone else's money.
I'm unreasonably excited about it. For $25 I get to have a picture of my choosing taken in space!
At $25 per picture there must be 40 000 people as excited as you for this project to get funded. I just don't see how is that going to be even remotely possible.
>At $25 per picture there must be 40 000 people as excited as you for this project to get funded.
Not really.
Take away all the backers over $1000 (because I notice you complaining about that in another post), scale up the number of backers for every <$1000 level proportionally to reach $1M and it would only take 16,500 people.
There are a lot more rewards than that.
I think they are just running a really cool scam. First of all why do they care if public is interested in space? Aren't they after all, looking to run a successful and profitable business? Second, don't they have investors that could sponsor this Arkyd Telescope and launch it without need for a Kickstarter. What if for some reason the kickstarter campaign doesn't work? What if they can't deliver? Are they willing to risk everything just to get 1mln$? Unless they are already out of money.
Disclaimer: I'm at the launch event and helped put this project together.
They're not doing this for the Kickstarter money. Even though they're fundraising for the project, they're already putting in more than they could ever hope to raise on Kickstarter.
This project is adjacent to their core mission of Asteroid Mining, this is to prove interest that the public is interested in this sort of project, and to give the public access to the sort of thing that was, previously, impossibly expensive.
For $25 you can get a picture of yourself in space. That's pretty crazy.
Still the question remains - why risk bad pr if this doesn't work. and why not concentrate on building the telescope first and proving that they can do it before asking for money? At this point it looks like they are trying to run "your picture in space" business, not asteroid mining.
I think they're pushing the "picture in space" as a sort of hook to gather public interest. Large scale public interest in their projects has the potential to bring in larger funding from entities that might otherwise not be interested.
Personally I think this is an excellent idea. The picture in space is a great little incentive to get people to take a closer look at the project.
Of course, there is the risk of failure and the bad PR that goes with it. That said, the list of endorsements they have is pretty impressive, and pushing the idea that a first grader could in theory direct the satellite to take a picture of his or her choice could give them a huge boost in interest.
Well people may be excited about them getting already to 100k. Problem is 50% of that money comes from people who spend 1k or more - three of them spend 10k each. So I don't see potential for a failed Kickstarter campaign which would be a disaster for them
they are suppose to be in asteroid mining business, that they said could bring trillions of dollars in profits. Why do they care about the public? There is something fishy going on here :)
Why wouldn't they care about the public? The local copper mining operation often buys advertising to boost its own public image; why not an asteroid mining operation?
> For $25 you can get a picture of yourself in space. That's pretty crazy.
Well... A picture of a picture of yourself in space.
Can you give us a rough sense of scale of how the $1 million from the KickStarter compares to the other costs required to bring to completion 1) everything promised in the KickStarter, and 2) their first satellite in space capable of scoping out NEOs?
The $1M isn't going toward the cost of the satellite - they're already building those for their primary mission.
This is to pay for the launch of an extra one, that has little to do with their core mission of asteroid prospecting, and everything to do with inspiring and educating.
From my understanding, the $1M pays for a launch. They have already developed (or are still developing) the telescope satellite. If they exceed $1M, they may launch multiple satellites.
It seems that they are using Kickstarter for preorders. They'll reach a lot more people through Kickstarter than their own site. As zacharycohn said, the money they'll get through Kickstarter is probably nothing compared to other methods.
> I think they are just running a really cool scam.
While I'm not going to dispute this, I do disagree with it.
> First of all why do they care if public is interested in space? Aren't they after all, looking to run a successful and profitable business?
These goals aren't distinct. What's hard for people to remember is that running a successful and profitable business is a means. It's a how; the real question is what the end goal is. For a painfully large number of businesses, the goal appears to be making the CEO rich. But some groups, some CEOs, some businesses have goals that a lot of us would consider better: actually advancing humanity forward or providing quality service or the like.
I could be talking out of my ass here, but with the amount of money that's been pumped into PR (> $1B USD IIRC) by its big-name founders, why do they need to do this? Satellites are cool and all, but everything I see out of them is just "YOU GET INVOLVED" and "SOCIAL" - and not much on "How do we capture and capitalize on mineral resources in space?"
If this works, the amsat.org people should kickstart a fundraiser to get the legendary geosync sat up there. I'd be happy just with AO-40 redux, or a fleet of FM ez sats. Or maybe the mythical mars sat.
Honest question: Could you explain a bit more this topic? I don´t even know how to google it beyond geosync satellite.
AmSat [1] is an organization of ham radio enthusiasts that are also very interested in space and satellites. They've launched a bunch of their own satellites into space that are available for anyone with a ham license to use to communicate. These satellites are usually named /^AO-\d+$/. That's what the AO-40 reference is to.
I don't know anything about the geosync or Mars sats that the GP is referencing. I'm assuming those were proposed AmSat projects that have never been launched.
Edited to add: A ham license is easy (and cheap) to get. I studied for a few hours and paid about $10 at a local testing facility to get my license (KI6BJU). The equipment is a bit more expensive, but I'm not sure how much it costs for a decent setup because I worked in a lab that already had the equipment.
Once you have a license and equipment, you can talk to other people over the AO-sats and download pictures from scientific satellites. I got my license when I worked in a satellite lab, and we used the equipment to download weather photos from NOAA satellites and helped gather data from other scientific satellites like NASA and various aerospace companies and universities. A lot of satellites have some sort of beacon with a public data format that you can decode.
Some google targets would revolve around amsat phase 4 p4 phase IV.
P4 is a little ambitious so it oscillates over the decades between active and shelved. About two cycles ago it led to phase 3 rev D P3D or whatever aka AO-40 which launched a bit more than a decade ago.
As far as kickstarters go, the AO-40 launch would be kinda ambitious, I guess just the launch alone was five million or so. The boost engine blew up, screwing up the orbit and destroying some uplinks/downlinks, then years later further related failures blew out the DC power bus, and that was it.
Now build like 3 of them and launch them and you're almost guaranteed that at least 2 would work... Just bad luck for AO-40.
There has sporadically been talk of a P5 which would be an interplanetary payload.
I've watched this stuff from the outside for a couple decades, being all volunteer its very cat-herding.
One thing I miss (dating myself pretty severely) is the Russian HF band satellites, requiring no fancy hardware on the ground and no ground computer support. I used to listen to RS-10 morse code telemetry on ten meters using basically normal ham radio shortwave gear, then there was a complicated little decode algorithm to convert raw data into actual data.
Another thing I miss is there are/used to be FM voice "easy sats" requiring pretty basic VHF/UHF FM gear. Very popular. Need more of those. I believe there's only one working ezsat in orbit right now and the hope is the FOX-1 project will deliver another working one later this year.
I also miss the high altitude / 12 hour pass Molinya orbit sats. Thus requiring fancy gear, but the highly elliptical orbits meant you could talk for hours instead of 10 minutes horizon to horizon.
So there's a lot of stuff to google for.
Ham radio is a fun, big hobby. Life's too short to actually do or try everything possible even in just the narrow confines of satellite operation, much less everything else.
could some 100s of those small telescopes be used with interferometry to get a better picture?
Optical band sensors are not fast and low-noise enough, by several orders of magnitude, to do the sort of digital interferometry available with radio telescopes. Optical interferometers so far require optical correlators. This geometric rather than data-analytical approach mandates knowing and controlling the delay distances between the beams of light down to the nanometer. Combined with adaptive optics, this is some of the highest resolution imagery we can produce; But it is extremely limited because of the practical difficulties of these hardware concerns, even in a situation where there is a massive underground lab connecting the telescopes like at the VLT. Satellites floating in free space on opposite sites of the Earth affected by differential atmospheric drag, geomagnetic and heliomagnetic effects, and even relativistic differences would present what appears to be an intractable problem for this technology.
What about some kind of periodical signal with known timing and fase that could be used to calibrate and syncronise the signals at post processing? Something like a film clapping board, but in space.
Several orders of magnitude too slow sensors to discern that signal, again; to say nothing of actually controlling the spacecraft's distance. The periodical signals you mention would be just fine for discerning the position of radio interferometry nodes because it's a lot less of a technical challenge and because we can afford to do a few days of computational work for a given millisecond of data, but not at the nanometer & femtosecond scale of precision in real time at low latency.
The difference between radio and optical-infrared regions of the EM spectrum is not just about what the human eye can see, it's a fundamental difference in how we measure - the former allows us to directly sense the shape of the EM waves as they come in, while the latter is much higher resolution, but forces us to indirectly make conjectures based upon how much energy was deposited onto some specialized sensor in a macro-scale time period.
Here's what Wikipedia says about the boundary region between the two bands, which is poorly studied because neither paradigm works well: "Terahertz radiation occupies a middle ground between microwaves and infrared light waves, and technology for generating and manipulating it is in its infancy, and is a subject of active research. It represents the region in the electromagnetic spectrum that the frequency of electromagnetic radiation becomes too high to be measured by directly counting cycles using electronic counters, and must be measured by the proxy properties of wavelength and energy. Similarly, in this frequency range the generation and modulation of coherent electromagnetic signals ceases to be possible by the conventional electronic devices used to generate radio waves and microwaves, and requires new devices and techniques."
The type of precision required here is well out of the reach of normal engineering, it requires specialized tools like diffraction interference wavefront sensors just to make sure the shape of the mirror is precise enough. That we've gotten it working at all with multi-focal optical systems (for very bright stars, at least) is a bit of a miracle, and some of the techniques required certainly involve the type of signal you're talking about just to get it operating in the lab. Measuring distance with this kind of resolution is just not something we have to do often, especially for very large distances.
The next step in optical interferometry is certainly not this kind of solution, it's building a space interferometer with a normal real-time optical correlator, as a single structural satellite, 2 mirrors on opposite ends of an enclosed truss. A project modeled on that principle with 2x 50cm mirrors has been a bridge too far for us, delayed and cancelled with NASA budget cuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Interferometry_Mission
Amazing reply, thank you very much! This is an awesome physics unexplored field (maybe not unexplored, but yet with lots of stuff to learn) How cool would be a kind of antenna that is able perform the same function as a mirror but in an electronic way and not in a visual one.
In the optical wavelengths offline interferometry is currently not possible afaik.. so you have would to directly combine the signals, which I deem implausible to do in an non-lab setup, as you have to align the paths (from the individual telescopes to the interferometer) to a fraction of the wavelength.