The more NyanSat ground stations are out there, the more they can do together, communicating with known satellites or even probing the more stealthy or unknown objects orbiting the Earth. Individual NyanSat base stations don’t have to work as part of a collective and share data, but in many ways the devices have more potential as part of community research than as individual instruments. There’s already an active Discord channel where people are getting their base stations up and running and discussing ideas for long-term projects.
“Let’s say we have 1,000 of these base stations distributed across North America,” says Cui. “If you could shine a radar beam into the sky not knowing if something is there or not, the chances that it’s reflected back to you, the sender, would be astronomically small. But if we have thousands of base stations all listening, they could amplify and correlate from whichever station hears the bounce back to find debris or other objects you wouldn’t know are up there.”
While the NyanSat project promises an impressively cheap ground station, it isn’t the only way to hunt for space debris or undocumented satellites in orbit. Groups of amateur observers have been tracking spy satellites for decades. There’s precedent, too, for creating a low-cost, decentralized, open source ground station networks. A project known as SatNOGS, founded in 2014 during the NASA Space App Challenge hackathon, does similar work and has more than 60 deployed ground stations around the world. SatNOGS is run through a larger organization called the Libre Space Foundation. The ground stations cost between $300 and $500 to build. Cui says that he hopes the NyanSat and SatNOGS communities will overlap, since all of the software and schematics for both projects are open source and could augment each other.
“Although indeed there seem to be some similarities, there are many differences regarding the scope of our respective projects,” says Pierros Papadeas, director of operations for the Libre Space Foundation. “That said, we would wholeheartedly welcome as many open source projects and implementations of any part of the full satellite communications technology stack, since it could only mean more collaboration opportunities and a chance to broaden the open source space ecosystem. We can’t wait to get our hands into a NyanSat kit and hack it to run SatNOGS client.”
In addition to the low-cost ground stations, the Red Balloon researchers also collected equipment to build a mobile, military-grade ground station that can serve as a sort of queen bee for the NyanSat hive. The device is a weather-sealed, military spec antenna station designed to mount on a Humvee for satellite communication—the kind of thing that would come in handy in a disaster zone. The ground station transmits on a microwave frequency band reserved for satellite communication called the Ku band, and unscheduled transmissions from a ground station of its power would be illegal, as regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. But the researchers will run a livestream during Defcon showing the ground station’s parts and how it’s constructed to offer a deeper understanding of what goes into a high-precision and accuracy ground station—very different than the cheap components in a NyanSat ground station. Participants will also be able to control the station remotely, with limitations on transmitting, and listen in on satellite transmissions with more range and clarity.
“Pretty amazing what you can buy in mint condition for $1,600 from liquidators in New Jersey,” Cui says.
Or a lot less, if all you’re after is a little low-key community satellite tracking from NyanSat.
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