karn@eagle.UUCP (11/02/83)
The following is from the 1 Nov 1983 issue of the New Scientist, page 73. Note that this new satellite is *not* PACSAT; it is UoSAT-B, and will be called UoSAT-Oscar-11 if all goes well and it reaches orbit. The "mailbox in the sky" which is referred to here is actually just an engineering test experiment (various memories, etc.) The PACSAT people are flying it on UoSAT-B only because the Surrey people decided to take advantage of the last remaining polar Delta launch opportunity. The real PACSAT will still fly on the Shuttle in 1986. Phil Karn, KA9Q "Britain's mailbox heads for the skies" "A British-built satellite that will act as a "mailbox in the sky" for radio amateurs should go into orbit early next year. The vehicle, the second in a series of cut-price satellites built at the University of Surrey, will contain an electronic memory that receives messages from the personal computers of radio enthusiasts. The memory will store the messages, transmitting them to receiving equipment only when the satellite is in the right position above the Earth. "For a team of 20 engineers at the university, building the space vehicle will be a race against time. NASA in the US has told the group that its satellite can hitch a free lift into space on board a rocket due to leave the ground in March. The rocket's main mission will be to take into orbit a remote sensing satellite to replace the ailing Landsat 4. But the Surrey team will have to squeeze into six months work that would normally take up to three times as long. "The university's first spacecraft, UOSAT-1, [actually, UoSAT-Oscar-9 -PK] is still circling the globe two years after it was launched. It gathers information about radiation levels and the Earth's magnetic field. The satellite also has a speech synthesiser with which it relays spoken messages to receiving station. Martin Sweeting, the leader of the university team, regularly tunes into the messages with a cheap radio in his back garden. He has even "listened in" while on holiday in the Himalayas. "A second part of the project is to find cheaper ways of building satellites. The first Surrey vehicle cost &250 000. A comparable craft built by industry would cost some 40 times as much."