Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on June 26, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.
I thought now that I don’t have to submit a darn long essay to ISRO since I’m out, I can settle down and think about what has happened with SEDSAT2 all this time. These are my personal opinions..and all that.
SEDSAT2 started out in mid-November about two weeks before my semester exams. Cool no?
Before I could even decide whether I should participate in the project, the wiki page, the mailing list and all were setup. So, all I had to do was join in. We had a very small but great team of people who came together to begin thinking on this project – Chris, Kirk, Tom, Geoff, Michael, ME and Lavina. It was we who finally (after many delays) finally put our heads together and wrote the paper which basically said – yes, this crazy idea is possible.
To describe this crazy idea – we are thinking of designing and building a cubesat (a 10×10 cms 1 kg satellite orignially designed by CalPoly) but not in one university but by linking through a string of universities all throughout the world. The major aim of the project was also to take a look at how international collaboration projects in space look like at the student level of things. The idea, as I have mentioned above was crazy to say the least.
But the more we thought about it, the more we believed that it could be done.
So, we invited people via mailing lists to submit their applications to become members of the team and boy, did we have a great response – 30 people from 12 countries.
In between all of the babble, we finally defined our goal –
to build a cubesat using international collaboration
small and sweet, no?
Also, we got a lot of support from SEDS alumni like Chris, Aaron and Kirk. Aaron gave us a software that he’s being putting together which he calls ProtoForge. Protoforge is sort of like a check list which helps us with our thinking and also makes sure we are following logically and helps us manage our “huge” team. It’s great thing to have on a satellite project.
Fast forward to the present, I’m now looking after the structures team on SEDSAT2. I’ve brushed up on all the basics that I might get hit by and hope that I’m now prepared to read more complicated stuff. Hmm..I think that’s it for now…
Parallel Spirals 