2023 Grant Recipient
Virtual Tower - Virtual Satellite
Tennessee Valley Stellar Corporation (TVSC or “Stellarcorp”) is building a Virtual Tower – a novel application of an aerial radio transceiver around a drone in a box. Unlike permanent towers, our elevated transceiver is temporary (~45 minutes hover) but rapidly deployable / relocatable.
It is suitable for diverse weather and terrain since it can be protected from the elements and operated anywhere permissible. A virtual tower can substitute for many applications hosted on a fixed physical tower, including search and rescue, emergency response, orienteering, and routine station operations.
Tennessee Valley Stellar Corporation
Stellarcorp is also building a Virtual Satellite. An observer on the ground sees a typical satellite in low Earth orbit go from horizon to horizon in about 5 minutes. But instead of hovering at a fixed altitude as above, a drone can also fly any programmed path, while simultaneously adjusting the power and sensitivity of its transceiver. This means that, from the point of view of a fixed ground station, a drone can mimic the overhead trajectory of any satellite or celestial body, as well as its emission / reception characteristics. To the observer, the drone’s actual ~2-km flight path is indistinguishable from ~2000-km path of the real thing. Because the overflight by definition takes the same 5 minutes, a drone can fly multiple passes on a single charge. Thus with a simple mode shift, Virtual Tower becomes Virtual Satellite, providing a way for users to learn how to “work a bird”, at a tiny fraction of the expense and lead-time. Stellarcorp is developing an open-source Sortie Planner and user interface to go with this.
Project Goals
1. Virtual Tower
Demonstrate emergency message passing between two ground stations and one aerial station – the drone acting as a radio relay.
2. Virtual Satellite
From a fixed point on the ground, demonstrate the capability mimicking the path of a satellite or a celestial body like the Sun or Moon.
Virtual Tower and Virtual Satellite are rapid prototyping methods for early development of space communication skills, in support of our long-term prototype satellite project, the Dyson picoDot. Our ultimate aim is to prove that a feasible space-based method exists to forestall catastrophic climate change, to be used in extremis, by artificially cooling the earth with a school of planetary sunshades flying in non-Keplerian radiation-levitated orbits sunwards of the Sun-Earth Lagrange-1 point (SEL1(lev)).
Virtual Tower - Virtual Satellite
Tennessee Valley Stellar Corporation (TVSC or “Stellarcorp”) is building a Virtual Tower – a novel application of an aerial radio transceiver around a drone in a box. Unlike permanent towers, our elevated transceiver is temporary (~45 minutes hover) but rapidly deployable / relocatable.
It is suitable for diverse weather and terrain since it can be protected from the elements and operated anywhere permissible. A virtual tower can substitute for many applications hosted on a fixed physical tower, including search and rescue, emergency response, orienteering, and routine station operations.
Tennessee Valley Stellar Corporation
Stellarcorp is also building a Virtual Satellite. An observer on the ground sees a typical satellite in low Earth orbit go from horizon to horizon in about 5 minutes. But instead of hovering at a fixed altitude as above, a drone can also fly any programmed path, while simultaneously adjusting the power and sensitivity of its transceiver. This means that, from the point of view of a fixed ground station, a drone can mimic the overhead trajectory of any satellite or celestial body, as well as its emission / reception characteristics. To the observer, the drone’s actual ~2-km flight path is indistinguishable from ~2000-km path of the real thing. Because the overflight by definition takes the same 5 minutes, a drone can fly multiple passes on a single charge. Thus with a simple mode shift, Virtual Tower becomes Virtual Satellite, providing a way for users to learn how to “work a bird”, at a tiny fraction of the expense and lead-time. Stellarcorp is developing an open-source Sortie Planner and user interface to go with this.
Project Goals
1. Virtual Tower
Demonstrate emergency message passing between two ground stations and one aerial station – the drone acting as a radio relay.
2. Virtual Satellite
From a fixed point on the ground, demonstrate the capability mimicking the path of a satellite or a celestial body like the Sun or Moon.
Virtual Tower and Virtual Satellite are rapid prototyping methods for early development of space communication skills, in support of our long-term prototype satellite project, the Dyson picoDot. Our ultimate aim is to prove that a feasible space-based method exists to forestall catastrophic climate change, to be used in extremis, by artificially cooling the earth with a school of planetary sunshades flying in non-Keplerian radiation-levitated orbits sunwards of the Sun-Earth Lagrange-1 point (SEL1(lev)).
Community Benefit
Multiple communities would benefit from the project Stellarcorp is asking the Hacker Initiative to support. Here is a non-exclusive list.