Kidsat
From BovineNet
Kidsat (later renamed to EarthKAM) is the name of an educational-outreach program operated by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), and the University of San Diego. The goals of the project were to allow elementary and middle-school students request high-resolution photographs of the Earth's surface to be taken by a digital camera on the Space Shuttle, at the next time it orbits over the requested coordinates. The images were downloaded to the ground via an intermittent KU-band transmission, then manually color-corrected by ground crew, and uploaded to a website for the children to view.
[edit] Flight software
When I worked at JPL in 1995, one of the things I did was to develop the 2nd generation of the Kidsat "Flight Software" (FSW), which would run onboard an IBM ThinkPad laptop on the Space Shuttle. The FSW was a 32-bit Windows application written in Visual C++, with use of the TWAIN image acquisition and Victor image processing libraries. The laptop used a tethered SCSI connection to communicate with the Kodak Professional Series 460 DSC (Digital Still Camera), a 3060 x 2036-pixel (6 MegaPixel) camera.[1]
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[edit] External links
- ISS EarthKAM on Wikipedia
- JPL Press Release (April 5, 1995): JPL Offers Surplus Computers to Southland Classrooms -- includes mention of my name in the last paragraph.