Space

630 Articles

Two telescopes looking into the night sky.

Making A Backyard Observatory Complete With Retractable Roof

May 24, 2025 by 16 Comments

Here’s one for our astronomy geeks. Our hacker [arrow] has made their own observatory!

This particular video is a bit over ten minutes long and is basically a montage; there is no narration or explanation given, but you can watch clear progress being made and the ultimate success of the backyard facility.

Obviously the coolest thing about this building is that the roof can be moved, but those telescope mounts look pretty sexy too. About halfway through the video the concrete slab that was supporting one metal mounting pole gets torn up so that two replacements can be installed, thereby doubling the capacity of the observatory from one telescope to two.

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In Memory Of Ed Smylie, Whose Famous Hack Saved The Apollo 13 Crew

May 18, 2025 by 30 Comments

Some hacks are so great that when you die you receive the rare honor of both an obituary in the New York Times and an in memoriam article at Hackaday.

The recently deceased, [Ed Smylie], was a NASA engineer leading the effort to save the crew of Apollo 13 with a makeshift gas conduit made from plastic bags and duct tape back in the year 1970. [Ed] died recently, on April 21, in Crossville, Tennessee, at the age of 95.

This particular hack, another in the long and storied history of duct tape, literally required putting a square peg in a round hole. After an explosion crippled the command module the astronauts needed to escape on the lunar excursion module. But the lunar module was only designed to support two people, not three.

The problem was that there was only enough lithium hydroxide onboard the lunar module to filter the air for two people. The astronauts could salvage lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module, but those canisters were square, whereas the canisters for the lunar module were round.

[Ed] and his team famously designed the required adapter from a small inventory of materials available on the space craft. This celebrated story has been told many times, including in the 1995 film, Apollo 13.

Thank you, [Ed], for one of the greatest hacks of all time. May you rest in peace.

Header: Gas conduit adapter designed by [Ed Smylie], NASA, Public domain.

Voyager 1’s Primary Thrusters Revived Before DSN Command Pause

May 15, 2025 by 43 Comments

As with all aging bodies, clogged tubes form an increasing issue. So too with the 47-year old Voyager 1 spacecraft and its hydrazine thrusters. Over the decades silicon dioxide from an aging rubber diaphragm in the fuel tank has been depositing on the inside of fuel tubes. By switching between primary, backup and trajectory thrusters the Voyager team has been managing this issue and kept the spacecraft oriented towards Earth. Now this team has performed another amazing feat by reviving the primary thrusters that had been deemed a loss since a heater failure back in 2004.

Unlike the backup thrusters, the trajectory thrusters do not provide roll control, so reviving the primary thrusters would buy the mission a precious Plan B if the backup thrusters were to fail. Back in 2004 engineers had determined that the heater failure was likely unfixable, but over twenty years later the team was willing to give it another shot. Analyzing the original failure data indicated that a glitch in the heater control circuit was likely to blame, so they might actually still work fine.

To test this theory, the team remotely jiggled the heater controls, enabled the primary thrusters and waited for the spacecraft’s star tracker to drift off course so that the thrusters would be engaged by the onboard computer. Making this extra exciting was scheduled maintenance on the Deep Space Network coming up in a matter of weeks, which would have made troubleshooting impossible for months.

To their relief the changes appears to have worked, with the heaters clearly working again, as are the primary thrusters. With this fix in place, it seems that Voyager 1 will be with us for a while longer, even as we face the inevitable end to the amazing Voyager program.

Open Source ELINT Accidentally From NASA

May 11, 2025 by 9 Comments

You normally think of ELINT — Electronic Intelligence — as something done in secret by shadowy three-letter agencies or the military. The term usually means gathering intelligence from signals that don’t contain speech (since that’s COMINT). But [Nukes] was looking at public data from NASA’s SMAP satellite and made an interesting discovery. Despite the satellite’s mission to measure soil moisture, it also provided data on strange happenings in the radio spectrum.

While 1.4 GHz is technically in the L-band, it is reserved (from 1.400–1.427 GHz)  for specialized purposes. The frequency is critical for radio astronomy, so it is typically clear other than low-power safety critical data systems that benefit from the low potential for interference. SMAP, coincidentally, listens on 1.41 GHz and maps where there is interference.

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UK CanSat Competition, Space Ex, Lancing College, Critical Design Review

Lancing College Shares Critical Design Review For UK CanSat Entry

May 4, 2025 by 2 Comments

A group of students from Lancing College in the UK have sent in their Critical Design Review (CDR) for their entry in the UK CanSat project.

Per the competition guidelines the UK CanSat project challenges students aged 14 to 19 years of age to build a satellite which can relay telemetry data about atmospheric conditions such as could help with space exploration. The students’ primary mission is to collect temperature and pressure readings, and these students picked their secondary mission to be collection of GPS data, for use on planets where GPS infrastructure is available, such as on Earth. This CDR follows their Preliminary Design Review (PDR).

The six students in the group bring a range of relevant skills. Their satellite transmits six metrics every second: temperature, pressure, altitude reading 1, altitude reading 2, latitude, and longitude. The main processor is an Arduino Nano Every, a BMP388 sensor provides the first three metrics, and a BE880 GPS module provides the following three metrics. The RFM69HCW module provides radio transmission and reception using LoRa.

The students present their plan and progress in a Gantt chart, catalog their inventory of relevant skills, assess risks, prepare mechanical and electrical designs, breadboard the satellite circuitry and receiver wiring, design a PCB in KiCad, and develop flow charts for the software. The use of Blender for data visualization was a nice hack, as was using ChatGPT to generate an example data file for testing purposes. Mechanical details such as parachute design and composition are worked out along with a shiny finish for high visibility. The students conduct various tests to ensure the suitability of their design and then conduct an outreach program to advertise their achievements to their school community and the internet at large.

We here at Hackaday would like to wish these talented students every success with their submission and we hope you had good luck on launch day, March 4th!

The backbone of this project is the LoRa technology and if you’re interested in that we’ve covered that here at Hackaday many times before, such as in this rain gauge and these soil moisture sensors.

Make Your Own Telescope, Right Down To The Glass

May 1, 2025 by 13 Comments

Telescopes are great tools for observing the heavens, or even surrounding landscapes if you have the right vantage point. You don’t have to be a professional to build one though; you can make all kinds of telescopes as an amateur, as this guide from the Springfield Telescope Makers demonstrates.

The guide is remarkably deep and rich; no surprise given that the Springfield Telescope Makers club dates back to the early 20th century. It starts out with the basics—how to select a telescope, and how to decide whether to make or buy your desired instrument. It also explains in good detail why you might want to start with a simple Newtonian reflector setup on Dobsonian mounts if you’re crafting your first telescope, in no small part because mirrors are so much easier to craft than lenses for the amateur. From there, the guide gets into the nitty gritty of mirror production, right down to grinding and polishing techniques, as well as how to test your optical components and assemble your final telescope.

It’s hard to imagine a better place to start than here as an amateur telescope builder. It’s a rich mine of experience and practical advice that should give you the best possible chance of success. You might also like to peruse some of the other telescope projects we’ve covered previously. And, if you succeed, you can always tell us of your tales on the tipsline!

There’s A Venusian Spacecraft Coming Our Way

April 29, 2025 by 29 Comments

It’s not unusual for redundant satellites, rocket stages, or other spacecraft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. Usually they pass unnoticed or generate a spectacular light show, and very rarely a few pieces make it to the surface of the planet. Coming up though is something entirely different, a re-entry of a redundant craft in which the object in question might make it to the ground intact. To find out more about the story we have to travel back to the early 1970s, and Kosmos-482. It was a failed Soviet Venera mission, and since its lander was heavily over-engineered to survive entry into the Venusian atmosphere there’s a fascinating prospect that it might survive Earth re-entry.

A model of the Venera 7 probe, launched in 1970.
This model of the earlier Venera 7 probe shows the heavy protection to survive entry into the Venusian atmosphere. Emerezhko, CC BY-SA 4.0.

At the time of writing the re-entry is expected to happen on the 10th of May, but as yet due to its shallow re-entry angle it is difficult to predict where it might land. It is thought to be about a metre across and to weigh just under 500 kilograms, and its speed upon landing is projected to be between 60 and 80 metres per second. Should it hit land rather than water then, its remains are thought to present an immediate hazard only in its direct path.

Were it to be recovered it would be a fascinating artifact of the Space Race, and once the inevitable question of its ownership was resolved — do marine salvage laws apply in space? –we’d expect it to become a world class museum exhibit. If that happens, we look forward to bringing you our report if possible.

This craft isn’t the only surviving relic of the Space Race out there, though it may be the only one we have a chance of seeing up-close. Some of the craft from that era are even still alive.

Header: Moini, CC0.