Space Camp

SPACECIALIST has teamed up with SPIRE (A US based new space company) to enable students (age 12 and up) to access and operate real satellite in space.

The first and second satellites in that series were launched successfully out of the international space station in November 2013; the third satellite was successfully launched on the ‘Dnepr’ lunch in June 2014. More satellites are planned to be launched during next year.

SPACECIALIST offers a Space Camp with hands on software and hardware experience in which students will end up operating a real Nanosatellite in space. The experience is composed out of two parts, first we enable the kids with all the knowledge they will need in order to be able to control and activate the satellite. In the second part, the students will actually control and follow the satellite for seven days via the telemetry stream at the comfort of their personal computer. The recommended number of participants is 20-40. The satellite operating part will be done it teams of 4 participants per team.

All courses are led by aerospace engineers with instructional experience.

As mentioned, the space camp composed out of two parts:

• First part:
• Educational, approximate 30 academic hours of study.

Second part: The students will command and control the satellite for full seven days.

The series of lecture contains the topics:

An introductory course in aerospace engineering and operation of satellite ArduSat

• Space environment
• Types of satellites and satellite missions
• Satellite orbits
• ArduSat satellite structure and sub-systems
• Foundations of Software Engineering
• Programming ArduSat Satellite
• Hands on work on Arduino parts of the satellite
• Preparation for the experiments, testing the Arduino satellite hardware and code writing

We recommend this series of lectures to be tote in five full days (six hours a day) or in a course of eight weekly meetings of three to four hours per meeting.

This series of lectures consists of basic and crucial knowledge for satellite operations, therefore it is a must. (See appendix A for a sample agenda)

Satellite operating:

After designing and writing the experiment and its command code, the command files made by the students will be uploaded to the satellite and the students will be granted with a username and password to access the satellite telemetry stream for seven full days.

During this week, and the following weeks, the students will independently gather the relevant information out of the telemetry stream to analyse the results of their experiments.