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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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... A picture of a picture of yourself in space.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
