


At 10:02 PM 6/4/99 +00-05, Bruce Paige wrote:
>The Space shuttle will launch a satellite called Starshine at 11:20pm 
>tonight our time it is a 19" satellite covered with mirrors. It is 
>expected to stay in orbit for about 8 months. They have called upon the 
>ham radio community to assist by providing WWV time and ticks to students 
>should they call. The students have been told how to find a HAM in their 
>location by looking us up on the WEB in a Call Sign data base

If the students start out on the web, then they should just go to


which is the web-based clock provided by the National Institute of 
Standards and Technology (NIST), formerly known as the National Bureau of 
Standards (NBS).

This will get them time ticks as good as calling a ham and listening to WWV.

Asking thousands of students to call random hams by looking them up in the 
callsign database sounds like some new kind of abuse.  That is as bad as 
asking thousands of students to call people at random by looking them up in 
the phone book.

The idea of having students observe a satellite and try to compute its 
orbit is a great one.  Could be done with the shuttle or MIR.  Later can be 
done with ISS.  Does it really require a special satellite?  Does the 
starshine satellite really have any reasonable purpose at all?  I don't 
think so.
