I've been busy writing satellite decoders. Here they are!

GEOSCAN

https://github.com/radio-satellites/geoscan-tools

Notes - this one was fairly fun to reverse engineer, but the codebase really quickly got complex. Eventually, this was superseded by a better decoder that could read frames well.

Lucky-7
(unpublished)


Notes - this one was quite easy to do, with a very strange image format

RoseyCubesat-1

https://github.com/radio-satellites/RoseyCubesat-1-tools

Notes - I was really surprised that this satellite downlinked imagery in raw format... so essentially it was reading the counters/headers and compiling the 8 bit values into an image.

NOAA HRPT!

https://github.com/radio-satellites/python-hrpt

Notes - this one was HAAAAARDD. It took a long time, a few months, to get this to work.

UmKa-1



This one is different in two ways... for one, it uses a transport frame similar to CCSDS, which is not quite the same as the other ones. The second difference is that it's an amateur "Hubble" in space! It takes images of stars and galaxies. UmKa-1 is not quite yet transmitting (only being deployed recently), but will be soon. The example data is from a CADU that the team sent over.

I present to you!

Logbook Of The Universe!

The general idea is to have a bunch of people as contributors (anybody who wants to) and have everybody post there without any interruption. The general idea is to get a healthy mix of people's opinions I guess

https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c3315862

EDIT: As it turned out, this question was in the original What If? book, but I answered it to the best of my knowledge anyways >>>


"What if you had a mole of moles?"

Somebody happened to submit this through the form a few days ago.

If I'm understanding this correctly, you want to gather a mole () of moles (the animal). This is not a good idea.

A mole (or avogadro's number, or avocado's number) is a unit that's used for counting molecules. There are a lot of molecules, so that's why that number is so big.

Moles are also little creatures that are occasionally quite disgusting, as seen here:

To get a feel for this question, let's just imagine a 1 pound mole.



(for reference: this is my attempt at drawing a mole that is coming out of a hole in the ground. Don't judge.)

You can probably throw a 1 pound mole, except that it would be quite disgusting and you'd probably drop it right away. Let's do a little side-by-side comparison of Avogadro's number and the weight of the Earth:



From here, we can see that NOT ONLY does everything line up with the weight of the Earth.... the moles would weigh more.

Uh oh.

It's a pretty rough estimate, though, and we could be off by a pretty large factor. However, it does tell us that we're talking about a pile of moles on the scale of a planet.

Let's get some numbers:

An eastern mole weighs about 75 grams. This means that alltogether, a mole of moles weighs



That's a little over half the mass of our moon.



So if you want a mole of moles.... good luck sourcing them!

I'm here, just finishing up another essay for this

... and the official announcement hasn't been made yet, but I'm writing here that LAB-SES-1 will be launching on March 3-4, if the predictions look good.

The payload is a camera and an Arduino telemetry transmitter. If you live near the Great Lakes area you may receive the telemetry and contribute!!

Telemetry is on 434.05MHz, FM. The format is as follows:

Standard 50bd RTTY, 170Hz shift.
CW camera photo beacon, right before the RTTY, all in one telemetry stream.

If you're using FLDIGI to decode, here are the settings (under TTY modem/TX/custom):



Make sure "stop bits" is set to 2.

We will also have an IRC/Discord server to discuss the telemetry as the flight progresses in real time.

73!

Sasha VE3SVF

Absolute banger of an article, take a look!!!!

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-inside-story-of-the-first-picture-of-a-black-hole

I just looked and I have 4 seperate essay projects for this blog