Photographing The ISS With A Thrift Store Lens Is Challenging

May 3, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

There are plenty of photos of the International Space Station out there on the Internet, but taking your own from ground level is a special challenge. [saveitforparts] recently decided to attempt this feat using a $15 thrift store lens.

What a setup! The lens is so big it has its own tripod mount.

The cool thing about the digital photography revolution is that there is a lot of old film gear that can be had for cheap. In this case, [saveitforparts] found a 400mm Sigma XQ lens with a 2x teleconverter for just $14.99. Paired with an adapter, it sat nicely on a Sony NEX-3 digital camera, ready to try and capture the ISS as it passed overhead. As you might imagine, aiming at the space station is not a point-and-shoot job. N2YO.com was used to figure out the best time to try and capture it. [saveitforparts] was able to capture the ISS as a white dot as it passed over, but couldn’t quite get enough zoom to really see the ISS in detail. [saveitforparts] was also able to repeat the feat with a Canon camcorder, too, but the image was still pretty blobby and didn’t show much. Later attempts involved capturing transits as the ISS passed by the Sun, though the ISS mostly appeared as a small speck.

[saveitforparts] did technically capture the ISS, just not closely enough to see much beyond a dot. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this attempted, though! If you try and capture the ISS with something truly ridiculous, like a Game Boy Camera or Kodak Charmera, you are honour-bound to tell us on the tipsline. Video after the break.

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A Guide To CubeSat Mission And Bus Design

April 28, 2026 by Al Williams 9 Comments

If you mention the word bus, you might think of public transportation or, more likely for us, a way to connect things together. But in the satellite world, the bus is the part of a vehicle that supports the payload but isn’t itself the payload. Typically, that means the electric power system, propulsion, radios, and thermal control, among other systems. If you are designing a CubeSat, you will want to read A Guide to CubeSat Mission and Bus Design by [Frances Zhu].

The Creative Commons-licensed book has twelve chapters, ranging from systems engineering — that is, defining what you want to do — to analyzing structures, handling power, setting up communications, and more. Of particular interest to us was the chapter on command and data handling. The final chapters cover software, system integration, and there’s even a chapter on Ethics.

If you want to build a CubeSat or just want to learn more about how satellites actually work, this is a great read. There are videos and other features, too. If you don’t like reading in your browser, you can download an EPUB, PDF, or MOBI near the top of the page.

There are many resources for the want-to-be CubeSat builder. You can even start with an open source design.

What Have We Dumped On The Moon?

April 22, 2026 by Al Williams 53 Comments

If you read a headline that signs of intelligent life were found on the moon, you might suspect a hoax. But they are there! Humans have dumped a lot of stuff on the moon, both in person and via uncrewed rockets. So after the apocalypse, what strange things will some alien exo-archaeologist find on our only natural satellite?

The Obvious

Of course, we’ve left parts of rockets, probes, and rovers. Only the top part of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module left the moon. (See for yourself in the Apollo 17 ascent video below.) The bottoms are still there, along with the lunar rovers and a bunch of other science instruments and tools. There are boots and cameras, as you might expect.

But what about the strange things? As of 2012, NASA compiled a list of all known lunar junk that originated on Earth. The list starts with material from the non-Apollo US programs like the Surveyor and Lunar Prospector missions. Next up is the Apollo stuff, which is actually quite a bit: an estimated 400,000 pounds, we’ve heard. This ranges from the entire descent stage and lunar overshoes to urine bags. There are even commemorative patches and a gold olive branch.

After that, the list shows what’s known to be on the surface from the Russian space program, along with objects of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and European origin.

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China Is Shooting For The Moon Sooner Than You Think

April 14, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 69 Comments

Humanity first reached the moon in 1969. We went back a few times, then lost interest within three short years, and we haven’t been back since. NASA has just flew a quartet of astronauts around the moon last week, and hopes to touch lunar soil by 2028. But the American space program is no longer the only game in town.

China has emerged as another major player in the second race for the Moon. Having mastered human spaceflight 23 years ago, the country’s space program has been moving from strength to strength. A moon landing is on the cards, with the country hoping to plant its boots, and presumably flag, in 2030.

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From Lunar Dust To Breathable Air

April 13, 2026 by Ian Bos 27 Comments

Moon missions are hot again for the first bit since the space race. While the previous period had us land on the big lunar rock, the missions of tomorrow have us living on it. The initial problem of landing in one piece has been solved, but there are many more puzzles to solve. One major issue of living in the vacuum of space is the lack of breathable air, because, ya know, it’s space.

This brings us to today, where [Blue Origin] has announced a prototype method of turning Moon dust into the valuable gas we call oxygen. [Blue Origin] hasn’t posted much about the actual process behind this feat, terming the system “Air Pioneer”. What we do know is that it requires melting the regolith and then passing current through to release the O2 molecules from their rocky prison.

While some publications on this matter have been calling this a first in its entirety, this isn’t entirely true. NASA has worked on this technology for the past couple of years, called “Gaseous Lunar Oxygen from Regolith Electrolysis”, or (GaLORE). What [Blue Origin] has done, however, is complete the task under a for-profit motive. Perhaps this can introduce the drive needed to accelerate the development of the tech? (If anyone knows any more detail about the Blue Origins system, please let us know.)

Private space is certainly an exciting and quickly moving space in nearly all regards. It’s important to see how far we have come from the initial moon missions. If you want to check out some of the wackier lessons from that era, be sure to read up on the fight for moon cockroaches!

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A Mercury Rover Could Explore The Planet By Sticking To The Terminator

April 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

The planet Mercury in true color. (Credit: NASA)

With multiple rovers currently scurrying around on the surface of Mars to continue a decades-long legacy, it can be easy to forget sometimes that repeating this feat on other planets that aren’t Earth or Mars isn’t quite as straightforward. In the case of Earth’s twin – Venus – the surface conditions are too extreme to consider such a mission. Yet Mercury might be a plausible target for a rover, according to a study by [M. Murillo] and [P. G. Lucey], via Universe Today’s coverage.

The advantages of putting a rover’s wheels on a planet’s surface are obvious, as it allows for direct sampling of geological and other features unlike an orbiting or passing space probe. To make this work on Mercury as in some ways a slightly larger version of Earth’s moon that’s been placed right next door to the Sun is challenging to say the least.

With no atmosphere it’s exposed to some of the worst that the Sun can throw at it, but it does have a magnetic field at 1.1% of Earth’s strength to take some of the edge off ionizing radiation. This just leaves a rover to deal with still very high ionizing radiation levels and extreme temperature swings that at the equator range between −173 °C and 427 °C, with an 88 Earth day day/night cycle. This compares to the constant mean temperature on Venus of 464 °C.

To deal with these extreme conditions, the researchers propose that a rover might be able to thrive if it sticks to the terminator, being the transition between day and night. To survive, the rover would need to be able to gather enough solar power – if solar-powered – due to the Sun being very low in the sky. It would also need to keep up with the terminator velocity being at least 4.25 km/h, as being caught on either the day or night side of Mercury would mean a certain demise. This would leave little time for casual exploration as on Mars, and require a high level of autonomy akin to what is being pioneered today with the Martian rovers.

Top image: the planet Mercury with its magnetic field. (Credit: A loose necktie, Wikimedia)

The Brits Made A Rocket. What Happened To It?

April 9, 2026 by Jenny List 22 Comments

Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to enjoy online. Their most recent may be of interest to Hackaday readers and has more than a bit of personal interest to your scribe, as it visits the Spadeadam rocket test range on the event of its closure in 1973. This marked the final chapter in the story of Blue Streak, the British intercontinental missile project that later became part of the first European space launcher.

It’s possible citizens of every country see their government as uniquely talented in the throwing away of taxpayer’s money, but the sad story here isn’t in Blue Streak itself which was obsolete as a missile by the time it was finished. Instead it lies in the closure of the test range as part of the ill-advised destruction of a nascent and successful space industry, just as it had made the UK the third nation to have successfully placed a satellite in orbit.

We normally write in the second person in our daily posts here at Hackaday, but for now there’s a rare switch into the first person. My dad spent a large part of the 1950s working as a technician for de Haviland Propellers, later part of Hawker Siddeley, and then British Aerospace. He was part of the team working on Blue Streak at Spadeadam and the other test site at RAF Westcott in Buckinghamshire, and we were brought up on hair-raising tales of near-disasters in the race to get British nukes flying. He’s not one of the guys in the video below, as by that time he was running his metalwork business in Oxfordshire, but I certainly recognise the feeling of lost potential they express. Chances are I’ll never visit what remains of the Spadeadam test stands in person as the site is now the UK’s electronic warfare test range, so the BBC film represents a rare chance for a closer look.

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