DeepEarthScience

Monday 20 October 2014, we started the construction of DopTrack, a satellite tracking station on top of the tallest faculty of Delft University of Technology for students to use in satellite orbit determination. I will try to report on our findings of building it in this blogpost. We are in the process of setting up a dedicated website, but for now you have to do my blog ;) Project DopTrack As a master student, I followed several courses on orbit determination and satellite data analyses in the Astrodynamics & Space Missions group. During this time, I also observed the design and launch of two cube-sats of the space system engineering group. I was inspired by what students and university staff could accomplish. Come on, they launched two satellites in space. SPACE!!! However, after launch and succes of the missions the satellites were left alone. It would be cool to combine the use of these satellites and the knowledge from satellite data analyses courses. So I decided, when

Last week, I saw a very incredible photo compilation. The Rosetta ESA satellite is currently orbiting a comet in outer space. Onboard is a camera, that is constantly taking pictures of the object. On thursday 2 October, the ESA Rosetta blog showed active geysers, shooting water of the comet out into space. What we learned as a kid, we can now see with our own eyes (well via the camera lens, a high-data space downlink, and a remarkable team in the ESA Operations & Science). Active geysers on a COMET !!!!!! Amazing. After re-finding myself from being blown away by amazement, I continued browsing this blog . There, I found that they had build a 3D model of the comet and you (as an internet user) could download it to built your own comet. Totally awesome, unfortunately, I do not have a 3D printer. Nevertheless, I downloaded the files from the blogpost ( see here ). You can download .wrl and .obj files. Clicking on the .obj file, opened the comet in Adobe Photoshop. Look at that, I