Earth calling the ISS

Cornwall’s Goonhilly Earth Satellite Station, and the iconic Arthur satellite dish, brought Britain into the space age. It enabled transatlantic broadcasts for the first time, carrying pictures of Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon on 21 July from NASA to Europe, with a global audience of around 600 million, and modernised communications with the rest of the world.

‘Project Arthur’ was created after a visit to Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall to discuss an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. The visit came just after the paper engineering issue of HackSpace magazine, which inspired me to have a go at creating the model.

Being a fan of the Pi, I wanted to make the model interact with something, so I found an applet on IFTTT that posts a tweet when the ISS is over a specified latitude and longitude. The Pi then listens for the tweet, and flashes the LED when it’s over your location. I have also included an audio snippet of the moon landings’ radio transmissions on GitHub, that I would like the model to play via a Speaker pHAT too, but haven’t found the time yet. The paper templates, code, and tutorial can be found at apollo50.co.uk.