APOD: 2021 March 28 - SuitSat 1: A Spacesuit Floats Free

Good morning, Rallypoint. Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is titled "A Spacesuit Floats Free." Can old spacesuits become useful satellites? Some of our Russian partners in the International Space Station (ISS) Program came up with the idea. And so an old spacesuit was outfitted with with three batteries, a radio transmitter (in the helmet, set to 145.990MHz), and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power. Nicknamed "Ivan Ivanovich" (e.g. Mr. Smith), the official designation of SuitSat was AMSAT-OSCAR-54. For those who don't know (and that included me until this morning), AMSAT is the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, and Project OSCAR started in 1960 and was responsible for the construction of the first Amateur Radio Satellite OSCAR-1 (launched in 1961 from Vandenburg AFB in California).

Back to SuitSat. Once it was filled with old clothes and other discardables, SuitSat-1 entered its own independent orbit just after 23:05 UTC on February 3, 2006 when it was taken on a spacewalk from the International Space Station by Valeri Tokarev and Bill McArthur as part of an unrelated spacewalk. Voice messages recorded by the teams involved, and by students from around the globe, were continuously broadcast in a number of languages from the SuitSat, along with telemetry data. The last confirmed signal report from SuitSat-1 was on February 18, 2006. On September 7, 2006, at 16:00 GMT, Suitsat-1 re-entered the Earth's atmosphere over the Southern Ocean at 110.4° East longitude and 46.3° South latitude.

When you can't take a bunch of old clothes to Goodwill, you've got to be creative.