From hobbyist to space telescopes and amateur satellites, Ben Cartwright (Wuthering Bytes 2019)

so uh basically the idea of this talk is to kind of inspire you guys in to think of ways that you can get involved in the space industry because it's actually much more accessible than you think um the image it tends to have is it's all massive geostationary communication satellites and really complex space telescopes and it is but it's also a lot more than that um so i'm gonna kind of talk about the two threads that i took to get into my career one of which is very very traditional it's the degree into job fred but the other one is very much the opposite and that is um will become clear very soon so i am a spacecraft electronics and systems engineer at stfc rail space um we are one of the government's national labs building effectively science instruments for space research uh i am also the lead pocket cube engineer at a small group of amateurs called the flame trench and i'll get into more about that as well and i have a bunch of other hats and we'll touch on some of those throughout the talk so for people i assume most of you don't know the space industry so it's actually growing like never before and there's money flowing into it from everywhere governments are throwing money in it's not just governments but it's also businesses and universities and research institutions and high schools and charities and every type of organization and individual that you can imagine is actually investing and doing things in the space and so if you think about just governments we call that old space this is like the 60s and 70s in the apollo era we don't do that anymore we have commercial entities and all kinds of things going on and we call this new space which is where all the money is and the result of that is actually never been a better time to get involved in the space sector and there's so much opportunity to do really interesting things and the technology is just getting to the point where we can do really incredible things and i'll touch on that in a bit so i actually did not come from an aerospace background i came loosely from an aerospace background but actually mostly as a maker my dad ran a rapid prototyping and industrial modeling company and i grew up learning to build things with my hands and i tried to take that through all of my schooling basically and i did every subject that would get me into a workshop for about six years straight at school um and that was all i wanted to do for basically my entire school career um so i did the whole standard computer computer drawings we learned some prototyping i started building some stuff with simple arduinos um that evolved into some internet of things type stuff with when the arduino young came out if anyone's familiar with that that's like a wi-fi connected arduino and i did a um amazon linked project with that uh i actually got very lucky because my the school i went to had lots of access to stuff most makerspaces hopefully have um and i kind of had a lot of experience with all different kinds of making things at a very young age and i took that forward but actually what i wanted to do was learn how to make things that did things i wasn't familiar like happy with just making something in my hands i wanted to make something that did something useful um and so i did a degree in electronic engineering and computer science because i didn't want to make it too easy uh and this was a really easy progression from what i've been doing i've been playing with arduinos and i've been playing with simple microcontroller projects and this was a progression into doing some more complicated things and hopefully combining that with the skills i've learnt by making things and doing something more um turns out that pairing this to computer science is really useful because most things are embedded systems being able to program these and design them in the first place is incredibly valuable and i found that really useful going forward and actually it turns out that when we look at cubesats later on this is really really useful because this type of satellite is about 80 embedded systems and nothing else so actually i really wasn't interested in space um i grew i like i knew it existed but it was i had no intention of working in it i didn't really know what i wanted to do for a living um and then in december 2014 i watched this happen alive five four three two one and liftoff at dawn the dawn of orion in a new era of american space exploration [Music] 40 seconds still looking good [Music] supply valve open in the second stage one minute 22 seconds at max 2 maximum dynamic pressure on the vehicle and in 124 mach 1 orion and delta 4 now transcending the speed of sound 1 minute 31 seconds then [Music] control on the first stage coming up one minute four seconds [Music] must be now 1341 feet per second one minute 50 seconds in [Music] still looking good i'm gonna find two ends two minutes into the fall on the first stage horton's right i haven't got the entire launch because it's about 11 minutes but i cut that before the boosters came off but the that's the kind of the gravity of some of what this stuff is and actually this was the first flight of nasa's new crew capsule that was the first thing that said to me that actually there's a new push in the space industry going on and i want to be a part of that because a few years before this happens the space shuttle was grounded and it never flew again um and there was kind of a rule where we were sending astronauts to space to the space station on the soil spacecraft but that's kind of not really in the public eye at all and the space industry as a whole wasn't really in the public eye and when this flew this was really the first the first sign that there was something else going on that someone my age could be a part of and something more than my parents would have seen in the 60s like that level of push to have a new space industry um so at the time this was also the most powerful rocket flying and this of course has had its record smashed by the falcon heavy um if anyone saw that launch this has gone up i think it's gone twice this year so far um and yeah so my actual first contact in the space industry if you pardon the pun was in my second year of uni and we went to a hackathon at the riverfront appleton lab in harwell um and that's called the actin space hackathon and it's sponsored by the european space agency and multiple other aerospace companies and basically the idea is you get a set list of topics from multiple aerospace companies and they say to you use space technology to solve a relative problem to one of these topics and we went and had a team and we tried to develop a company to launch autonomous glider systems and the idea would be you could do research in the atmosphere by sending up a glider on a helium balloon but instead of having to chase it halfway across the country to get your data back it would fly back to where you were and it would all be very safe and you'd be able to make sure it didn't fly across airports or rocket launches as the the way we started was and this was all supported by the business incubation center and they actually work in harwell and they are effectively a startup incubator and they will if you have an idea in the space industry they will support you and give you funding and office space to develop that further and there's been quite a few very successful companies that have come out of our program uh unfortunately we were not one of them um not only did we not win the hackathon but the legal side of this was awful um do not try to fly autonomous drones in the uk you'll have a headache and unless you know several lawyers it's really not worth the problems um but this was this was our original idea of from my like aviation background and some of the embedded stuff i've been working in and is this was this the way i was gonna find something to work on in the space industry uh actually no it wasn't but in my third year i went to go to back to rail space and i did a placement year and i was working on instrumentation that's currently flying on nasa's solar dynamics observatory and that is it's in space between the earth and the sun and it's constantly looking at the the edge of the sun and we want to study the heliosphere which is like the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere uh that's the spacecraft there we see the four instruments there those are four telescopes we built the electronics for each one of those remote sensing instruments uh and basically i was working on different ways that we could improve that front-end technology these big camera sensors so if you haven't seen a space instrument before that's what one looks like this box is a big box of electronics that controls the camera sensor this is a cryostat that holds the sensor about minus 60 degrees centigrade and the reason we do that is because we need a really really really low read lawyers on the sensor and actually most of the noise is thermal until you get into about -60 so we have to ch chill it right down in a vacuum or it's the sensor is unusable so this is the actual camera sensor here this little rectangle so think about the one that's in your phone it's about a millimeter square this one is about five by three inches give or take and most science grade ccds are about that size so you kind of get an appreciation of the size and the quality of the instrument and you've ever seen a picture like this well that's what that camera takes um i don't know what spectrum that's in i think there's a few different wavelengths that those instruments take so the goal of my placement was to look at ways of improving space telescope technology and one of the reasons is because space telescopes have well they're very limited they build a lot of problems um the first one is they're very very unserviceable once you've launched a space telescope you can't go back to it you can't fix problems with it especially now the space shuttle's gone and the hubble is actually the exception and not the rules so for the most part if you have a science mission that goes wrong you're stuffed you can't do anything you've just wasted 200 million dollars uh they're very expensive 200 million dollars and doing stuff in space is infinitely harder than doing stuff on the ground um and you have to pay for that unfortunately there's no other way around it they're permanently specialized so a ground-based telescope you can swap instruments out you can do multiple different science experiments with it a space-based telescope you can't you launch it with two instruments and it does a very specific thing and that's all it's ever going to do you can't change our instrument you can't change the science goals that's set right from the start of the design process and you never get back to it but also very power limited most telescopes get all their power from the sun this isn't exactly the most efficient way of doing it but we managed so far but really we have to be very careful with the amount of computing power that we can send up onto these telescopes because well there's just not that much power going around and if you're in a vacuum you have to get rid of all the heat that produces and that's actually very very difficult and something we have to look at very carefully in the space industry because heat doesn't leave spacecraft in the normal way there's no convection you have to radiate it all out and actually even the smallest electronics get extremely hot in space because you just can't dump the heat quick enough but the biggest one is that space telecoms are mass and volume limited you have obviously a certain amount of weight that you can send somewhere with a given rocket um and well the bigger the telescope the less the less places you can send it to and some missions you want to send to pretty exotic locations beyond the moon for instance um the volume issue is starting to come to a head with the james webb space telescope which is this one here so this is the i think 14 mirrors the jwst folds it up in the rocket fairing for launch if you saw the news they just finished building this or they mated the two halves of it um in preparation for final testing and launch but really this is not ideal at all um the launch process for this telescope takes about a month to finish there's that many moving parts that have to unfold in exactly the right sequence in exactly the right way that this telescope will ever work if any of those go wrong the mission is dead um to put this into a bit of context this is a 10 billion dollar telescope 10 billion dollars so cern cost about four and a half billion to put that into context um so i know most people in the space industry are going to be very very drunk when it's launches because if this goes wrong it's about 30 years of work up the spout um so effectively we want to solve this problem and we can't do it with bigger rockets because well they don't exist this is a render of spacex's bfr system before they changed it again um and if we could launch a 12 meter big telescope in one chunk we would but the rocket doesn't exist so we can't so how do we build better telescopes with the volume that we have given to us and this is the most technical slide in the presentation by the way so if anyone loses me here don't worry there are basically two technologies that i was researching during my placement year and first one is called digital correlated double sampling and basically what that means is current technology uses analog electronics to sample the waveform coming off of the camera sensor so all of the pixel data comes off as an analog signal you can sample that over time with analog electronics and then read that out and process it later the easier way well not easy way but the better way of doing it is to do all that digitally we do what's called over sampling where we take multiple really fast samples of that analog waveform and then we basically reconstruct it on an fpga and that allows us to do lots of really clever processing to both reduce the noise but also reduce the power concern consumed in the instrument and that's important because that allows us to build what's called an integrated focal plane and effectively what this means is you've got all of your camera sensors here and you've got your electronics mounted in a block behind it and the low power that you get from implementing this means that you get to put these right next to the camera sensors and it won't affect the thermal stability of them that much and that means that we get really really low noise instruments that can be built really compactly and the benefit of that is we get to take all of these little tiles and we get to stack them and the result of that is you get really really really big camera sensors and to to give like an idea of the scale of these uh the issa have a mission called gaia in space at the moment uh gaia is an astronomer mission it's basically measuring the position and location of stars in the sky and the focal plane for that is about this size it's about a meter by half a meter and that's just the camera sensor um there's also a mission which is i think it's a ground-based telescope called the large sim not synoptic survey telescope uh the size of the digital camera for that is about as tall as i am the focal plane is about this sort of size circular and well if you compare that to the one in your phone it's a pretty big scale so i now work again at ralph's base um i'm a graduate engineer and effectively i do the same job as i did two years ago so a bit of context we are the one of the seven research councils in the uk which means we are the public funded research body um the science and technology facilities council which is kind of the organization that raspberries comes under uh effectively we um provide science facilities and other capabilities for academia for industry and for our own research um examples of that are things like we have the isis neutron muon source which does materials research and things like electronics and radiation research uh the central laser facility which has the most powerful laser on the planet uh the vulcan petawatt laser and we also do things like scientific computing we've got lots of super computers we support experiments like cern we support our own particle accelerator experiments and we do things like astronomy research that require lots of computing power we have been involved in over 210 space missions uh notable ones include things like the huygens lander which went with cassini and landed on saturn's moon titan we built a sensor package on that we've done multiple solar cell physics experiments uh we're on most of the solar observation satellites that are in space at the moment um so right now i'm working on calibration tech for infrared instruments so most of these are for earth observation for studying our climate um and basically we want to have extremely well calibrated instruments to be able to take any science that's worth anything um the problem is infrared instruments you can't calibrate you can't calibrate on the ground and then just launch them because they drift so we have to have a way of calibrating them in space and the way we do that is basically a metal bucket covered in fanta black on the inside and that has the property of emitting almost zero visible light which means all of the light it emits is infrared which is its temperature and if we can measure the temperature of it really accurately without actually affecting the temperature then we can calibrate the sensor really really really well and actually so if you're building electronics that can measure the temperature of this calibration system to about three micro kelvin so three millionths of a degree without changing the temperature of of the target and i'm about to start literally on monday when i get into work on working on this is lagrange mission so this is going to go if you imagine the earth and the sun there's space between it and then you go off to the side a bit and we're going to put that over there and the idea is to watch the solar wind travel from the sun towards the earth and that tells us a lot about the space weather about how that affects the earth and its magnitude um it lets us study the properties of the sun's atmosphere so we've got two instruments on that and we're building camera tech for both of those so that's kind of the traditional route that i've had into the industry and before i get into the the non-traditional side of that i kind of need to go into cubesats which are a type of nanosatellite which is what they're called um which is you can hold in the palm of your hand basically and the technology for these is really incredible um and it's only ever been possible since microelectronics really developed and became mature um so because these are about 10 centimeters big you could hold one in your hand the universities have one u-cube set which is a 10-10 centimeter cube and they they build hundreds of these they're really popular for students for education needs um and for amateurs so they're used a lot for universities and teaching students they're used a lot for companies for doing technology demonstration things like that um amateurs use them a lot most amateur radio satellites are one new cubesats and well the technology for these is only getting better and the actual the opportunities are really cool here so for its context this is a six year cubesat made by planetary resources and this one is looking at asteroids and the idea is to find out how much water is on asteroids that are near the earth and the idea behind that is if you know which ones have water you can go and get it and it turns out water is actually really really valuable for space especially if you want to develop an economy in space because it's not only rocket fuel but it's also water and oxygen for potential crude missions so back in my degree in my final year we tried to build one this is a two and a half you cube set and effectively the idea was to try and build like a ground-based analog um so to do that i effectively tried to teach myself space systems engineering and try to work out how to make radio modules power modules computers or talk to each other and to try and at least get there and function as a real cubesat um so we had four people in eight months trying to build one of these and we got reasonably successful uh and the idea is we want the uni to try and mirror a lot of what the american colleges are doing and most american colleges have cubesat teams now and to try and start something off in this country that mirrors what the americans are doing and i think there's two or three universities that do do it here um but it's by no means as common as it is over in the us um and effectively what i did in terms of as well as getting four of these modules talking to each other but also getting solar data so the idea was you've got six solar panels all around the edges here and if you know the current coming off each one of these panels you can do some clever maths and work out where the sun is and that's actually really valuable because there's no other way to tell which way you're pointing when you're in space not without really big cameras and stuff to try and work out where stars are so a bit off from that so this is the flame trench is kind of a group of amateurs that i've been involved in for a while um and really this proves the value of networking on twitter uh because i met all of these people on twitter uh there's 12 of us pretty much evenly split between the uk and the us and like me they are also well they were students many of them are engineers some of them are scientists programmers teachers pilots there's a couple of paramedics there's at least one scientific communicator there's a filmmaker a couple of musicians it's quite a diverse mix um and we kind of ended up in a group chat and we decided to make a website to sort of show what we were building ourselves and use it as like a portfolio website so to speak um and what it kind of grew and now we have a couple of pretty major projects going on and i thought i'd share a couple of those uh so you can find us here and here and we also crowdfund on here and we've got two major projects one of which is a pocket cube satellite which is effectively a cubesat but smaller so a cubesat is a ten by ten centimeter cube a pocket cube is five by five centimeters cubed um but ideally no less capable than a cubesat uh and gaze is out of a project and we are trying to build a robotic observatory for astrophotography uh so this is our cubesat or pocket cube five centimeters uh we do we don't have a launch date so to speak but it's soon and we will be open sourcing it when we know it works um we don't feel as much value in dropping everything we have immediately into open source but we think if there's a proven platform here it's really valuable to amateurs and makers and other things like that and so we'll be making that available directly uh so actually these type of spacecraft these nanosatellites are really really good for amateurs to get involved because not only does it cost well fifty thousand pounds to buy one which is absurdly cheap in the space industry uh but you can just communicate with them and if you've got an amateur radio license you can transmit up to one but actually you don't have to have anything to be able to receive signals from one and you can there's all kinds of networks and ground stations that you can have to to decode transmissions coming down from spacecraft uh of which sat nogs is a great one and i think joey's going to do a big talk later about things like slap mogs uh so we are only crowdfunding this this is a hamster and how much your effort and it's we're getting there prototyping so to give you an idea of the scale of this uh this is the base plate of one of our structural models so that's that's our five centimeter base plates that's been machined from aluminium and then i also have one of the solar panels so this is one of our structural solar panel models so this is it's really small but it's no less capable than one of those of a cubesats there's bigger ones um the caveat is the power that this thing has to work is excruciatingly low uh over an entire orbit of 90 minutes there's an average power coming in of 190 milliwatts um so we don't have much to work with it's quite tight um so we have a bit of a different design to a lot of other cubesats if you look at pictures online there's a big stack of internal electronics and they cover things like the radio the power systems they've got the batteries in there um all the any payload you might have all the central computing are all in this internal stack um the problem with that is if you do that you don't really have any room for payload so what we did is we took all of those electronics in the middle and we put them on the inside of the solar panels so we have this big five panel rigid flex pcb which kind of unfolds into like a big cross and the idea is all of the spacecraft's platform electronics are on that big pcb and what that leaves is this big red area which is free for payload which is we think pretty unique for a satellite of this size uh and so we're thinking well what can we do how do we use this payload because we haven't got time to build a payload we've got to get the rest of it working so we want to do a student competition to go to engineering students in uk and the us through the uk seds and said usa organizations and ask students to submit proposals to fly their own payloads in space for what we think is a very very cheap opportunity and we'll the idea is we will choose one to two and give them support to build their own payload to test their own experiments and give them support over the next two years to fly that and well yeah we really can't afford to watch this thing so the other project is this observatory and this kind of stems from we kind of realized that there aren't really many online ways of doing astrophotography you either have to drop 6000 pounds on a really really expensive setup or you have to pay excruciating amounts to subscribe to someone's observatory online and we were like well that's not very good we can do better um so we are starting to build this two telescope setup the first one is on our discord uh here so we've got like a discord bot set up and if those you don't need discord it's like an online messaging service um and we've kind of got this little community going on discord um lots of people like students or engineers or other makers and there's actually a nice exchange of knowledge going on because not only do we share what we're working on but they get to share what they're working on and if we have problems or they have problems there's a nice exchange of of knowledge there um so the first one is using this telescope this little this orange tube here that's the celestron 6se and that's that's decent for planetary stuff and we're going to get that set up to do sort of not live streaming but very quick and easy to access photography the second one we're getting is newtonian and it's a lot higher quality and we hope to be able to get pictures of this sort of level in planetary and particularly in deep sky and will we want to get into symptoms and science and we want to try we think we can do spectrometry and we think we can do photometry with telescope of this quality um so but you don't know spectrometry is study of spectra so you can point it at something and see what it's made of effectively uh photometry is looking at the brightness of stars and through doing that you can find things like exoplanets when the brightness dips and if you observe it enough you start seeing a pattern and that tells you about some things in orbit around the star and there's lots of really interesting science you can do there and the other thing is outreach this is really really valuable we've had a couple of people ask us already can we use this for the student outreach and our answer is well we haven't finished it yet um so as soon as this is done this will be a really really really cool opportunity for teachers to to log in and be able to point this at anything in the sky so that's a bit about what i've been working on i want to extend the opportunities for like nine assats in general and try and show you some things that you can do with these um so these are quite new technologies um people don't really know the limits of what they're capable of um but the technology is progressing really really quickly microelectronics are kind of a known quantity now but none of this stuff is really improving in space so there's an awful lot of firsts happening at the moment um but there's still so many ways for amateurs to get involved and there's loads and loads of amateur satellites doing some really interesting things at the moment so this is a pretty early amateur amateur cubesat this is done by amazon uk and so basically it's just got a really easy to decode transmitter on it and the idea is that students can receive the signals and decode it and it has got a little science experiment that people can pull data from and i think this is still in orbit i'm not sure if this is still going i think it is and there's a bit more complex stuff that you can do so this this is light sail two and it was developed by the planetary society um it is a sequel to light sail one which was equally successful as this one um and the planetary society is effectively an amateur organization and they're a lobby they lobby in the us and they effectively are an outreach organization but they're not for profit um but they built this free youtube set here to demonstrate solar sailing um so this is about this sort of science it's about footlong and that was deployed by a student built small satellite called prox1 and at the moment right now it's demonstrating solar sailing for network orbit and it has very very um very it's done very well demonstrating uh orbit raising technologies uh without using any power and actually you can see it's live now this isn't a um it's not a particularly good link but if you google light style mission control you can see all of the live data coming from that and it's actually really cool to see it live and there is more stuff coming in the future so we think that nanosatellites are perfectly viable in deep space and we don't believe that you have to spend half a billion dollars to go into planetary science um so most of this boils down to is the communications and propulsion technology there and the answer is it's getting there and well we've just proven out some new really new technology with this one so this is a nasa cubesat er this is called marco it's a six year cubesat so it's the size of the planetary society one again um and this flew past mars it when it was launched with nasa's insight lander and when insight dropped through the atmosphere and landed uh marco those two of them acted as uh radio relays back to earth so we got live data from the entry descent and landing sequence of the insight lander uh the european space agency are doing something similar so this is a 12 year set so it's this one doubled again and they want to fly this satellite from a escape trajectory of mirth all the way to an asteroid under its own power and this is a cubesat this big and it's going about 40 million kilometers away to go and explore an asteroid and there's actually loads more cubesats going in and around the moon so nasa are launching multiple sls flights in the next four to ten years um and there are lots and lots of students and other companies and organizations that are already booked on and building cubesats to go and fly off and around the moon either for science or for education purposes or anything like that so the summary is there's really no better time to do this um you get into it right now it's growing so fast there's so much money in it there's so many interesting things that you can do and this reason is because the cost of orbit is going down so if people have been following spacex all they've started landing and reusing rockets and this is the main factor that is starting to get launched much much lower than it was before we're not quite there yet that's a bit a few years off um but prices like five thousand dollars per kilogram are very very good and happening right now um and as this drops that means there's more entries more people can get into the industry and can do really cool things and there's even companies doing their own small site launch vehicles that can so you have to ride along with a multi-million dollar science instrument you can go exactly where you want to go and most of us is because well these applications are super valuable if anyone's have a google nasa spinoff technology um that will tell you everything you need to know but even now there's much more new technology coming from cubesats so an example of that is something like planet labs uh they've developed the dove cubesat and they've got about 300 of those in orbit right now uh there are three youtube sets so that's big and they can photograph every square mile on the earth once every 24 hours and that that's very valuable for a lot of science purposes and other things and really eight years ago this sort of thing was it was unheard of no one would have thought you could launch a 300 cubesat constellation um but here we are and so really just get involved and i wouldn't want to not practice what i'm preaching so i started a company to look at developing solutions to send cubesats into deep space and to do extra extra science because mostly cubesats on normally the platform you use to do really advanced science missions but actually i think they can be and we're going to explore some of the solutions that we can come up with um to try to do a science and other things but not around the earth uh and we'll a lot of what i've talked about is quite technical um but if you're not technical there's still lots of things you can do to get involved so there are things called nasa socials which basically nasa have you over to one of their bases for two or three days and you go and watch a launch and they tell you all about the mission what it's doing and then you get to go off to the launch pad and watch it go off uh it's open days are another good one there's another one in on the 6th of october in the netherlands um they open at least one of their centers every year and those are really good to go and visit and see what's going on for most of these you have to apply online especially for nasa ones um they're not always open to international people but many of them are and they will take anyone who has any kind of unique following and i imagine many of you guys have a very unique social media following um so you don't have to have thousands and thousands of thousand followers we take lots of small people but the idea is that you help nasa always connect that what they're doing with people who wouldn't normally see it and i think that's very very valuable so really do take this it's so good if seeing a rocket launch is kind of like a once-in-a-lifetime thing um and so i went in april this year um and we went to see a northrop grumman cygnus mission which is resupplying the international space station um there's a picture of us with the next rocket in that series and that's because the first one was already on the pad um and they let you into the hangar you can go right close to it take lots of pictures and it's the scale of it is it's awe-inspiring um so for those of you who follow me on twitter uh i did promise a second rocket launch in this slide um so i'm gonna leave you with the rocket launch video that we took in april uh from two miles away in nasa wallops in virginia uh which is the closest you can get to any rocket launch in the western world um and this is in half speed slow motion this is this is actually what it feels like by the way you can really feel [Music] then that's it thank you very much you