Farewell SO-43 — SK tonight
Tonite sees the re-entry of a very interesting amateur satellite — SO-43(21 Jan 2003 @ 04:37 UTC, in the Pacific west of Costa Rica).
Many of you who were at the AMSAT meeting in Portland,Maine a couple of years ago remember a paper presented by Gil Moore, N7YTK describing the STARSHINE program — Disco Ball mirror satellites that were designed to foster interest in Space Science by the youth. Students all around the world polished the individual mirrors for the
satellites. Gil — who looks like a pirate with a black patch over his left eye — told us that STARSHINE-3 would carry a small amateur telemetry beacon on 145.825 MHz. The satellite,along with PCSAT NO-44 was launched on the first successful Agena launch from Kodiak Island in late September, 2001. The story is told at
http://www.onr.navy.mil/events/starshine/default.htm,
www.azinet.com/starshine/starshine3.html and
http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast09oct_1.htm.
When STARSHINE-3 was placed into orbit, it became Starshine Oscar-43 as
documented on the AMSAT web site at
http://www.amsat.org/amsat/sats/n7hpr/history.html:
Klla: amsat