Turning it off and on again IN SPAAACE! ISS animal-tracker kit needs oldest trick in the book Icarus – the ambitious project to track hundreds of thousands of animals from space – has hit an unexpected delay after a specialised computer installed on board the International Space Station (ISS) refused to work as intended. In order to fix the system, which was only switched on last week, astronauts will have to apply the …
slightly more complicated in space than it is in a corporate server room: before they can have a go at it, detailed procedures will have to be drawn up, and busy schedules will have to be cleared.
Some ISPs and banking businesses could do with applying that level of diligence to their corporate server room updates as well...
Why don't they give every animal a cell phone and Facebook account - It would probably be cheaper too - even if you had to put up cell towers on the savannas - then they'd know every thing about them you could possibly know - probably even where they took a dump! HA!
.
"Argos is certainly a great system: we have used it a lot from the beginning, and we are still using it. Yes, it is old, and they have to be backward-compatible, in many cases, and they have some restrictions, and we have a different set of requirements"
And still available click'n'collect from the Swiss Cottage and Guildford stores... order by 4pm and get a free £50 Argos voucher
(although you will have to spend 2 days downloading hundreds of updates because it's new old stock)
This is nothing to do with some spurious "server issues"! It's that the animals are threatening to take out a privacy lawsuit, as we haven't gained opt-in consent. Galactic Data Protection Regulations are very strict, and both the mice and the dolphins have very good lawyers.
On a similar note, I turned my telly on last week - and there was some program on about vets who do major surgery. So there was a dog, lying on an operating table, with all the usual paraphenalia of surgery around - and the funniest thing was that the TV company had pixelated the dog's face! So I'm presuming it refused to sign the consent form...
"The tiny gizmos are powered by the Sun and equipped with GPS, accelerometers, temperature, pressure and humidity sensors"
And they made thousands of them, which has to mean that they are cheap to make. So, when are we getting temperature, pressure and humidity sensors in our smartphones ?
Many phones, mostly the expensive ones, have barometers in them. They are used to track things like whether the user has climbed stairs. Otherwise, I don't think they're used all that much. At one point, a company manufactured temperature and humidity sensors and wrote the code to allow Android to use them, but a cursory check of this phone database shows that only nine Samsung phones included them, and those were from a while ago. I guess they weren't very popular.
Yesterday I accidentally splashed my phone with water and it gave me a system warning "Moisture detected in USB/charging port". Sure enough, it looked wet in there so I dried it with tissue and the warning went away. Possibly just measuring electrical resistance changes, but nevertheless I think that qualifies as a crude humidity sensor.
p.s. Yes my phone also has proper temperature and pressure sensors.
In a market where only a few tags are manufactured at a time, it's actually quite expensive. Satellite tags used to track wildlife movement range in the $1,000-5,000 range (a bit more than a smartphone, in some cases, but significantly more complex - think housing, pressure requirements, etc).
Also, you have to keep in mind that they are NOT manufacturing thousands of tags at a time. Every animal is unique. For example, there are seven species of sea turtles, so you might argue that there should be seven different tags for sea turtles. Heck, if you didn't know better you might even say one is enough. In fact, there are more than seven designs...significantly more.
Your cell phone definitely has a temperature sensor, but whether or not it has a pressure sensor or humidity sensor - I don't know. Pressure sensors are used to tell elevation (birds) or depth (fish/marine). I don't know how applicable that would be in cell phone usage.
This post has been deleted by its author
Ewe don't need expensive electronic devices to track sheep. too memory intensive, the satellites run out of ram. You simply use photo-reconnaissance, paint stipey paterns on the sheep's backs and it can all be done with baaaa codes.
I'd better flock off now. It's pub o'clock and I've just been given a gallon of Somerset farm scrumpy for my birthday.
Even a basic oscilloscope and current meter would have shown spikes on initial power up.
It's a well known issue in data center racks where the power distribution units can trip due to initial current load on powering on multiple servers all at the same time, even when the current rating on the the PDU is well within the limits during ongoing server usage. The PDUs and fans in the servers are the usual culprits for this spike in demand on power up.
200kg is a lot of kit to take to space. Are we sure it is only tracking? And apparently "The OBC-I [On-Board Computer] is installed inside the Service Module behind a ceiling panel" [https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/i/iss-icarus]. Is someone trying to hide it from the Russians?
The ICARUS system not only competes directly with the Argos system, but it also competes with Iridium, Globalstar, GSM as well as archival tags (ie: you have to physically get them back to see/recover the migratory track).
To answer your second question - There is nothing that you can tag with ICARUS that you cannot tag with an existing system.
It was an interesting scientific project/experiment, but I don't really see the viability in it long-term. There are already a number of systems that outperform whatever ICARUS claims it can do, and there are few transmitters out there collecting data (relative to other markets). Remember, there are only 8000 animals tracked at any given time on the Argos system which is the most well-known and used satellite system available for tracking wildlife. In addition, ICARUS will only be used on avian species for now, so the actual number of birds being tracked by satellite is quite a bit less than 8,000.
Perhaps not the best way to spend millions and millions of dollars...
Getting permits for tracking animals is not a guarantee. You, as the researcher, must demonstrate that whatever you are going to attach to the animal does not change their natural behavior. Consequently, it has been determined that animals should not carry payloads in excess of 2-3% of their body mass. So...the butterflies and bees of the world are safe regardless what the dreams of engineers are (at least for now).
According to the astronaut Michael Foale, at a talk in Reading yesterday, the Russians used cheap noisy fans in their bit of the space station. The Americans used quiet expensive fans.
It looks like the animal tracking kit used cheap Russian fans that weren't only noisy but keep sticking.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
