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Tracking the World's First Wooden Satellite


Max and 99

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You can soon log the world’s first wooden satellite, WISA Woodsat. WISA Woodsat is a research satellite with a mission to do material research in space. More specifically, explore the use of birch plywood in spacecraft structures. 

Plywood is a natural composite material and for decades it has been used as a structural material in many demanding industrial applications such as aircraft structures and propellers, windmill blades, as well as truck, trailer, and bus floors. WISA-Birch plywood is also used in LNG tanker ship insulation elements where the material needs to handle -163C (-261F) freezing temperatures. Plywood is strong and easy to work with and therefore the most common use of plywood is in buildings where the panels are used for creating load-bearing floors, walls, and roofs.

Heat, cold, and moisture are normal elements on the Earth’s surface but in space, the material faces different challenges. WISA Woodsat has two specific research focus areas – “super drying” and outgassing caused by the vacuum in space and harsh unfiltered UV radiation.The satellite carries a suite of sensors to measure changes in the wood material. But the primary way of observation is a camera, which is mounted on a unique selfie stick. The camera enables monitoring of the visual changes in the wood material. But, for the Geocaching community, the selfie camera has an alternative purpose. WISA Woodsat travels around the Globe once every 1.5 hours, making it an ultimate Travel Bug (TB9GB8G). You can log WISA Woodsat by finding the tracking code from the pictures, which the satellite has taken with its selfie camera.

The satellite uses LoRa radio, which is possible for radio amateurs to communicate with the satellite directly. You can download your own images from the satellite. But, if you do not have your radio equipment at the ready, you can visit wisawoodsat.space and explore the image gallery. 

WISA Woodsat is scheduled to launch from New Zealand with Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket before the end of 2021. Lots of unexpected events can happen in space so this schedule is subject to change. Add TB9GB8G to your Watch list to be notified with the very latest information.

 

TB9GB8G

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1 hour ago, Max and 99 said:

You can soon log the world’s first wooden satellite, WISA Woodsat...

 

Yeah... On the bottom of it's item description is    IMPORTANT NOTE: DO NOT write a log when you add the trackable to your Watch list. If you do so, the log will be sent as a mass mail to everyone else who signed up to the Watch list.  

So far, over a hundred didn't get that I guess... with 366 watching. A couple forums folks too.   :)

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I have scoured the internet for photos, videos, and articles on this satellite as soon as I heard about the geocaching code.  For the life of me, however, I cannot find the dang code in any of the photos!  Clearly, people have found it because I have it on my watchlist, and the logs that are sent to my email are growing exponentially.  What gives?  Anyone else have this problem?  Or am I just unobservant?

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12 minutes ago, HuFlungPu1230 said:

I have scoured the internet for photos, videos, and articles on this satellite as soon as I heard about the geocaching code.  For the life of me, however, I cannot find the dang code in any of the photos!  Clearly, people have found it because I have it on my watchlist, and the logs that are sent to my email are growing exponentially.  What gives?  Anyone else have this problem?  Or am I just unobservant?

I assumed we had to wait till after it launched to get the code. 

Edited by Max and 99
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6 hours ago, HuFlungPu1230 said:

 Clearly, people have found it because I have it on my watchlist, and the logs that are sent to my email are growing exponentially.  What gives?  Anyone else have this problem?  Or am I just unobservant?

 

The post right above yours explains it I think...   :)

People are posting Write Notes when the message in bold  on the trackable's page clearly says not to.

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lol, yes I posted a note right near the beginning before word was out en masse. I think it's a very neat project, and I don't recall any disclaimer saying not to post a note.  In any case, they don't seem to be locked the TB as they have in past cases until it's allowed to be discovered, so anyone adding it to their watch list should be aware of what that will mean for email notifications. If HQ doesn't lock it, the only person to blame for being overloaded by Note-posters is the person who puts it on their watch list :)

 

(we all know that a strongly worded sentence in a description won't stop people from doing what they are technically allowed to do; the TB owner should have it locked until it can be discovered if that's the case)

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On 1/5/2022 at 6:18 AM, Max and 99 said:

I've been checking for an update but I don't see any new information on the launch.

I looked around and can't find any new launch date or update other than first half 2022 as already mentioned by you. We Will have to wait... Happy new year by the way.

Edited by simon_cornelus
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No new update on the launch, but I thought this article was interesting, and related.

 

Woodsat

 

When the WISA Woodsat mission was announced in April 2021, our target was to launch before the end of this year. We missed this goal, but with many and very good reasons: our mission got better and even more interesting during the process of designing and manufacturing the satellite.

In principle launching a satellite is easy. Just build one, do all the necessary paperwork and book a launch. 

In practice, the process is slightly more complicated, especially if you want to do something as ambitious as we are. We'll do many firsts in space business: not only WISA Woodsat will use plywood as a main construction material of the satellite structure, but also the lower part of the body and a deployable camera boom will be 3D printed metal, we'll have unprecedented miniaturised science suite for studying the plywood behavior and we also carry along with the first Europan demo of a temperature adaptive memory membrane (4D printed plastic).

Originally we just planned to upgrade the Kitsat satellite stack and adapt it to the mission and slightly another radio band, but now our "bus", the electronics running the satellite, will be a state-of-art nanosatellite – ready for many follow-on missions after this one.

One important part of the process has been learning to handle and work with plywood. How should it be treated, machined, and coated? How does it behave in space conditions? The team at the European Space Agency has been rigorously analysing the samples and measuring the outgassing. 

Now we don't only know that plywood is certainly a very good material for space use, but also have established procedures for how it has to be machined.

Finally now in December most of the parts of the satellite flying to space and its identical spare unit are ready. Some of the electronics have been redesigned in November and December, and those parts remain to be manufactured. This is related to the change of the radio bandwidth as we couldn't finally use the radio amateur frequency because the International Radio Amateur Union considered after a long process that our mission doesn't meet the new strengthened requirements for a radio amateur frequency allocation. 

The positive side of this disappointment has been the fact, that commercial radio frequency makes our satellite bus better for use in different kinds of missions in the future.

At the same time, Rocket Lab's launch that we intended to fly with has been pushed to February. So, also if our satellite would have been fully fit for a flight already in September, we couldn't have launched this year.  These delays are still very normal in the space business, and in fact, being so well in the schedule as we and Rocket Lab are, is quite rare.

Right we're looking at a launch opportunity in spring for WISA Woodsat with another Rocket Lab's Electron vehicle; the new radio allocation takes time, and also concerning that, our space operations license is still being reviewed by the Finnish authorities.

We're also shifting our focus from designing the satellite to the future and our concrete mission in space with the planning of the actions right after the launch, early orbit operations, and during the actual science mission. The most hectic period will last two months, and after that – depending on the status of the satellite – the operations will be more automatic.

So, quite a lot has been and is happening, but right now we'll have a short break for the holiday season. It's time to relax for a while, 

Therefore this time is more than an appropriate moment to thank all people involved with our mission this hectic year.

The core team has been our people Samuli Nyman (main engineer), Bruce Clayhills and Tessa Nikander, and Kevin Vainio and Jaakko Kaartinen from Huld, supported constantly by Orcun Ergincan, Bruno Bras, Mathis Munck at the European Space Agency, Sami Uuksulainen at UPM Plywood, Marko Pudas at Picosun, Maido Merisalu from the University of Tartu and Markku Lindqvist at Delva.

Lisa Stojanovski, Johsua Hein, and Brian Hirsch from Rocket Lab have assisted us towards to launch.

Other persons involved are Panu Nurmilo from Nurmilo; Kimmo Kaario, Matti Anttila and Oova Virtanen from Huld, Juha Kilpinen, Joonas-Petteri Santala, Mika Peltola and Jukka Lähde from Tikkurila; Hannu Laine and Janne Oinas from Raflatac; Emmanuel Amorim, Fabrice Cipriani, Bruno Delacourt, Gregoire Deprez, Hugh Evans, Mircea Helici, Jussi Hokka, Ugo Lafont, Ricardo Martins, Adam Mitchell, Szilvia Szmolka, Adrian Tighe and especially Mikko Nikulainen and Riccardo Rampini from ESA; Nan Ekblom from Delva; Tuomas Terasvuori from Eurofins; Minna Lindroos, Kati Oinonen, Tommi Takanen, Marko Erola from UPM; Silver Roomussaar and Reet Treial from UPM-Kymmene Otepää; Caspar Ask Christiansen from Sens4; Raffaele Battaglia from OpenQCM; and Kimi Nivalinna from Laser Quality Markings.

Thank you all! And thanks also to Petra Wullings, Leo Nyman, Pekka Kouhia, just like Heidi Pennanen, Maija Lönnqvist from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, and many more who have been somehow involved with the mission.

Finally a special thank you to UPM Plywood's "space director" Ari Voutilainen, who has been backing our mission all the time with extraordinary enthusiasm.

See you in 2022!

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