> Is there any reason why a future Amatuer Radio Satellite could not > include a small telescope and CCD imaging.
In principal, no. In practice, how much are you willing to spend? Perhaps the biggest problem that needs to be solved is how to get the telescope pointed at the target you want. To my knowledge the best pointing accuracy we ever achieved in an amateur spacecraft was AO40 at about 1.5 degrees. And it was spinning, so we only took pictures of bright things like the Earth where we could get an image with a short shutter opening. To image stars, you'd probably want 3 axis stabilization which is a hard problem to solve on an amateur budget. It's not particularly easy on ARRISSAT-1 will have a camera aboard, but no pointing ability at all, so we'll be snapping pictures hoping the earth happens to be in the field of view in at least some of them. It'll have a nifty Russian instrument aboard to measure just how "hard" the vacuum is at the upper edge of Earth's atmosphere. So it's about more than exchanging grid squares (not that there's anything wrong with that). -Joe KM1P _______________________________________________ Sent via amsat...@amsat.org. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
