LOGAN, Utah — A group including technology giant Google plans to begin offering live streaming of data beginning Aug. 10 with the lunar flyby of NASA’s 36-year-old International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE)-3) through a new website called SpacecraftForAll.com.
A group including technology giant Google plans to begin offering live streaming of data from satellite missions beginning Aug. 10 with the lunar flyby of NASA’s 36-year-old International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE)-3) through a new website called SpacecraftForAll.com.
Other partners in the venture are Germany’s Bochum Observatory, Morehead State University, Space College and SkyCorp Inc.
“We are offering a modern way to aggregate and display streaming data from spacecraft to the web,” said Dennis Wingo, president of Skycorp Inc. of Los Gatos, California. “The graphics are going to be mind blowing.”
Currently, companies develop proprietary systems to compile scientific data captured by space-based sensors and relay it to ground stations, making the process time-consuming and costly, Wingo said. “By leveraging modern software and Google’s expertise in managing vast quantities of data, SpacecraftForAll.com will dramatically lower the cost of doing business,” he added.
Canopus Systems LLC, a commercial small satellite venture affiliated with Dauria Aerospace, will be the first customer to adopt SpaceForAll.com’s imaging metadata standard, said Tomas Svitek, president of Mountain View, California-based Canopus. Canopus is developing Perseus cubesats for the nine-satellite Deimos Perseus constellation, which Dauria and Elecnor Deimos of Spain plan to deploy to gather multispectral Earth imagery for applications including agriculture, forestry and business operation monitoring.
Skycorp signed the May 19 NASA Space Act Agreement that gave permission for a volunteer team led by Wingo and NASAWatch.com editor Keith Cowing to revive the ISEE-3 spacecraft launched in 1978 so it could resume its science campaign.
The team also attempted to divert the spacecraft from its heliocentric orbit and move it to the stable Earth-sun Lagrange point 1. Although the propulsion system prevented the team from diverting the satellite, it is returning the science data that SpacecraftForAll.com plans to stream.
