Cosmos-Skymed orbit at 90 degrees from each other. Four, as a constellation, polar orbiting, in a square, a cross, like target hairs, like a windmill. Sometimes they can be brought together as two pairs of satellites, 150 kilometers apart, at 20 degrees from each other and maybe this is to do with them becoming eyes, on either side of the earth, revolving, like skating partners.
They use radar, the four beams, the HH, the VV, the VH and the HV. So its one more than RadarSat 2 which has the HH, the VV and the VH but then its times four. Four eyes.
They are Italian too. I gave out my cards at the International Astronautical Congress. They say “love” “loss” “gold” and “swimming”. Riccardo took “love and “loss”. He looked sad, but I think he was glad that I’d remembered what is at the heart of things. He needed to write his name on one and he gave it back to me. I don’t know which one it was, “love” or “loss”, it seemed too personal, I didn’t want to turn the card over to find out.
Here is the first podcast from The satellite Investigations World Tour: Goonhilly One.
1. Open iTunes.
2. Go to Podcasts in the left hand menu.
3. Go to Advanced in the top menu and open ‘Subscibe to Podcast…’
4. Paste this url into the box http://www.aconnectiontoaremoteplace.net/world_tour/podcast_wt.xml
Many thanks to Des Prouse and Simon Gittins for this unique guided tour.
Voyages of spacecraft through the rooms, minds, garden, lanes, conversations, meetings, oceans, atmospheres, magnetospheres, the pulls and the pushes, the stages of certainty and uncertainty.
This is one plan, the first draft. It could work with a skeleton structure, that’s open enough for adaptation and improvisation, but explores themes, pathways and distances. A group of people listening and speaking, exchanging stories while moving through the spaces of the house and gardens.
1. The story of Cassini from its origins in the drawing office, through the potting sheds, the lanes, to launch and earth orbit, slingshot past Jupiter and now at Saturn.
2. My b&b landlady telling the story of how she came to live at the North Gate cottage, where she made a box seat in the bay window that looked out over the South Downs, when she managed the grounds, catering and chaos of the school, and the day she decided to leave.
3. Maybe for this first chapter we’re in the Common Room, with the chairs in a circle, everyone getting grounded and comfortable. This one is how other people came to be here. Craig has a good Kit car story. Where are people from, nearby, international? Is there a story to why you’re here?
4. So maybe a transit story to take us outside to the terrace on the way to the pond. GIOTTO and its journeys to two comets and back - is that right?
5. Lagrangian point one. Around the pond. Talk about what’s there, different people, many people. How do they move, do they see each other, what do they look like, what do you know?
6. Single story ‘AMPTE and the vacuum cleaner’ and then I want to hear about launches. Maybe for this we should be somewhere central again. I want descriptions of the noise and where you were, because these descriptions just embody the immensity of these projects and the emotional investment in them.
7. There’s a look out with a semi-circle of seats. I was wanting a point where people could talk about Cluster. I always like the descriptions of how it orbits, of the the tetrahedra and the string of pearls. Many people at mssl are connected with it and they talk to me about what it is that Cluster make visible.
8. Probably now it would be time to go into the social club for hot toddies and to talk about looking in and looking out. People’s perceptions from outside the lab and some of the night time stories of being in the lab with the champagne waiting for the launch - Mars ‘96 - and some of the oldest stories of the satellites from mssl. Thinking places too in and around the grounds.
9. The last part could be at Langrangian point two, round the swimming pool, guess it would be dark. About the cluster of satellites that are there, looking way out to the farthest infinites, the things that Ignacio told me about the galaxies and the stardust we are made from.
But maybe the very ending of the stories should be a surprise…
The man who tap danced to the beat of his heart. He tried to catch the rhythm and then, as it was caught, to break it. He called it Moon Calendar. He was thinking of it as a way of changing the centre point, from the beat of the heart to the footsteps, to the constellations of people, who might move to form a circle watching him, or not. In the way that you think of the earth being the centre for the moon, and you might be thinking about that when you shift to make the sun your centre, and anyway, you can decide to make a shift if you want, in whichever direction, always to break the pattern, always to make the expectation start somewhere else.
The Geostationary or Geosynchronous orbit is a ring around the equator, 36 000 kilometres from earth, holding an architecture of mythic proportions.
Goonhilly is connected to four groups - INTELSAT (intelsat was the first geostationary satellite to go up in 1965) INMARSAT (which is the International Maritine Satellite Organisation), PanAmSat and EutelSat. When they started with Intelsat they put one up over the Atlantic then one over the Pacific and then the Indian Ocean. Then they had the global coverage of three satellites in the geotationary orbit, in time to broadcast the moon landings.
The INMARSAT 4 series have something like 109 transponders, a 9 metre spot beam (something you can pay to have point at you), a transponder is circuitry, its the thing that sends and receives, that makes it work, receives, amplifies, sends. They are about seven and a half tons, something like a double decker bus, a spread of solar panels about 46 metres - FORTYSIXMETRES - a power station in space. Whizzing round the equator at 6 900 miles per hour, give or take.
They deal with phone calls, internet traffic, faxes, tv pictures, video conferencing - all the conversations and data too, banking facilities that lets people use hole in the wall machines in remote places. Many dishes can point to one satellite because they can carry more information than one dish can send.
At the peak there were 64 dishes at Goonhilly, in 2004. Now they’re gradually going. Its an economic decision. Its a nature reserve and it was built with the understanding that if sat com ceased, the dishes would be removed, something like this. The dishes are not protected, though the area is of special scientific interest. They have been part of the landscape for 45 years.
When you see the dish you can have some idea of which satellite it is pointing at, from the elevation.
They don’t control the satellites in any way, they deal with the signals going through - extra terrestrial relays. They do the dishes.
The geostationary is, of course a limited natural resource. Satellites are in ‘bays’ roughly 5 000 miles apart.
Telstar had synthetic sapphire windows to stop photons getting in. The first dish was built to communicate with Telstar and is a cross between a bridge and a battleship because the structural steelwork was provided by John Browns Land Boilers, who were a subset of John Browns ship builders. The structural concrete work was by Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company who were building the Tamar bridge at the time who went on to build the Forth bridge.
The sixty satellite dishes of the largest earth station in the world are being dismantled. Efforts are underway to suggest re purposing of the dishes. The receiving dishes can be used as radio telescopes, they could be used as parabolic antennas to harvest solar energy. They could be used for independent projects by scientists, engineers, artists, educationalists. As part of Deep Space Network constellations for other countries. So far the only public access is via the visitor’s centre, from where its very difficult to gain a deep understanding of the technology. The independent efforts to open up this resource to civil society will test the openness of the current owners.
Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station is on Goonhilly Downs in the South West of England, in Cornwall on the Lizard peninsula, not far from Lands End.
It received the first transatlantic television broadcast in 1962 via the Telstar satellite. Not far away, on the coast, Marconi sent the first successful transatlantic radio signal and across the bay at Porthcurno beach, underwater cables link to Gibraltar and to India and to Hearts Content in Newfoundland. The cables were originally made from gutta perche, which maybe comes from India and they were designed so that English people could yell orders down phone lines at laughing people around the world.
[16/9/08 I think Goonhilly is transmitting some things still. How can you tell? It feels like nobody is quite sure what will happen. Some of the dishes have already gone and people point to the empty space that was their dish that they use work on.]
