Pull out your ham radios and listen to...a space suit.
 

SpuitSat-1 "launched" today.

Astronauts on the international space station have stuffed an old Russian space suit with some instrumentation and a radio transmitter. They literally just tossed it out the door of the station. For several days it will be transmitting a recorded message in 6 languages at defned intervals on a frequencey of 145.990MHz until it burns up in the atmosphere. It will aslo have some basic telemetry instrumentation (thermometer, batter power guage, etc.). The idea is to get some measurements on the effects of prolonged exposure to open space on the suit.

SuitSat-1 should pass over the US once or twice a day during its decent. You can keep tabs on it at www.suitsat.org or NASA's tracking site.

Righ now, it's about 15 minutes away from crossing over North America (though it looks like it'll mostly be over souther Canada).

EDTI: err, never mind on the current data. I guess that was some dry-run tests. The suit won't be "launched" until approx. 2PM pacific time.

That is pretty cool! Thanks for posting this!:cool:
Donna

THat's so cool - I wonder what else they can chuck out of the space station to watch burn up in the atmosphere.

Another astronaught if he gets too cranky?

Well, it's off...but the bad news is early indications seem to show that the signal is way weaker than anticipated. Even one station with a large, adjustable antenna, and preamp to boost the signal was barely able to receive it. How disappointing.

Heck no, throw something bigger out!