DeepEarthScience

Reading the books and watching the TV series “the Expanse” awoken my old boyish-dreams of our presence on the Moon. Growing up with a dad that introduced me to the fantastic worlds of Larry Niven, Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, and Arthur C. Clark, gave me hope for the future and it motivated me to start my studies in Space Engineering. The science fiction became real-life science and engineering and I began to understand why the future was not yet achieved. We have made space engineering very complicated and expensive, which allowed only nations to perform this type of activities. But, I am living in the future of my old heroes of words and spaceflight has a permanent role in our daily life.  And more and more young engineers want to participate, because space is not that complicated anymore. We evolve as humans, such that complicated problems in the past are simple issues in the future. James S. A. Corey (A.K.A. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) hints to this as well in...

All the trees have blossom, baby ducklings are rooming the ponds, and we get more Sun: we survived the winter! Spring is here to give us our much needed vitamine D.  Spring on the campus of TU Delft Not only on the surface of the Earth this is felt, but also in outer space. The Delfi-C3, now more than 9 years orbiting our Earth, notices that spring has arrived on the Northern Hemisphere. During winter, our ground station (DopTrack) only receives data during the morning and mid day (between 8:00 and 13:00 CET). Starting from April, we start receiving signal around 20:00 CET. Fraction of a 24 hour day (UTC) at Time of Closest Approach (TCA) of the Delfi-C3 with DopTrack. We saw this already last year, when in April the telemetry of Delfi-C3 started appearing in the evening. The Sun was already set on the ground, but at 560 km height light was still shinning on the solar cells of the satellite. The satellite is designed such that when sunlight hits the solar cells and eno...

This year was the second time I gave my tutorial with an SDR dongle. The idea behind this tutorial is to simulate ground-station-to-satellite interaction in the radiowave spectrum. The ground station is replaced by the SDR dongle and the student's computer. For the satellite, I use a radio beacon designed and built by a colleague of mine. The device transmits an FSK modulated signal at a certain frequency. During the tutorial, the students learn to develope software that interacts with the SDR, such that they can process the digital stream observed by the SDR. I made a small video of the signal with GQRX software, such that you can see the signal in the frequency spectrum and listen to the FSK modulation. Last year, I was using an open-source software package "gnuradio" for the signal processing part, but I found out that this introduced a lot of trouble-shouting in the first few hours, because of students having: different operating systems and versions (every s...