Collaborate Disseminate
Monorails aren’t just the core reason why The Simpsons remains on air after thirty-six seasons, twenty-six of which are unredeemable garbage. They’re also an interesting example of oddball rail travel which …read more Continue reading Building A Small Gyro Stabilized Monorail
[Joe] at BPS.space has a thing for rockets, and his latest quest is to build a rocket that will cross the Kármán Line and launch into the Final Frontier. And being …read more Continue reading Rocket Mounted 3D Printed Camera Wheel Tries, Succeeds, and Also Fails
Tightrope walking is no mean feat — it takes years to master (even with a balance rod) — but that’s too much like hard work for [James Bruton]. Obviously, the …read more Continue reading Can You Cheat At Tightrope Walking?
Once launched, most spacecraft are out of reach of any upgrades or repairs. Mission critical problems must be solved with whatever’s still working on board, and sometimes there’s very little …read more Continue reading Quick Reaction Saves ESA Space Telescope
One of the most annoying things about bicycles is that they don’t stay up on their own, especially when they’re stationary. That’s why they come with stands, after all. That …read more Continue reading A Self-Driving Bicycle is Something to Marvel At
There’s no shortage of ways a satellite in low Earth orbit can fail during the course of its mission. Even in the best case scenario, the craft needs to survive bombardment by cosmic rays and tremendous temperature variations. To have even a chance of surviving the worst, such as a …read more
Continue reading Why Satellites of the Future Will be Built to Burn
When you think about all the forces that have to be balanced to keep a drone stable, it’s a wonder that the contraptions stay in the air at all. And when the only option for producing those forces is blowing around more or less air it’s natural to start looking for other, perhaps better ways to achieve flight control.
Taking a cue from the spacecraft industry, [Tom Stanton] decided to explore reaction wheels for controlling drones. The idea is simple – put a pair of relatively massive motorized wheels at right angles to each other on a drone, and use …read more
Continue reading Reaction Wheels Almost Control This Unusual Drone
Over the past few decades, numerous space probes sent to the far-flung reaches of the Solar System have fallen silent. These failures weren’t due to communications problems, probes flying into scientifically implausible anomalies, or little green men snatching up the robotic scouts we’ve sent out into the Solar System. No, these space probes have failed simply because engineers on Earth can’t point them. If you lose attitude control, you lose the ability to point a transmitter at Earth. If you’re managing a space telescope, losing the ability to point a spacecraft turns a valuable piece of scientific equipment into a …read more
Continue reading Do Space Probes Fail Because Of Space Weather?
The Kepler spacecraft is in the final moments of its life. NASA isn’t quite sure when they’ll say their last goodbye to the space telescope which has confirmed the existence of thousands of exoplanets since its launch in 2009, but most estimates give it a few months at best. The prognosis is simple: she’s out of gas. Without propellant for its thrusters, Kepler can’t orient itself, and that means it can’t point its antenna to Earth to communicate.
Now far as spacecraft failures go, propellant depletion isn’t exactly unexpected. After all, it can’t pull into the nearest service station to …read more
Continue reading Kepler Planet Hunter Nears End of Epic Journey
The inverted pendulum is a pretty classic dynamics problem and reaction wheels are cool. That’s why we like [Mike Rouleau]’s self-balancing stick.
The video, viewable after the break, was fairly sparse on details, but he furnished some in the comments. The little black box on the top is a GY-521 Gyroscope module. It sends its data to an Arduino attached to the black cord which trails off the screen. The Arduino does its mathemagic and then uses a motor controller to drive the reaction wheels at the correct speeds.
[Mike] mentions that he didn’t do anything too fancy with the …read more
