Tracking the ISS

When I was in college, actually doing graduate work at ODU, I was working on a project late one night in the Computer Science lab. One of my partners was an admin, so we had unlimited access to the Sparc stations there.

A friend of his, another admin, wandered in to the room that night. This guy was a real hacker, actually having been in trouble with the law. He was on probation, but free and doing work there. Somehow with his connections, he’d gotten a way to listen in to real-time broadcasts between NASA and the space shuttle. Since ODU had a lot of connections with NASA and professors working at both places, I’m not sure if this was unauthorized or not.

On this night, we ended up with a real time audio link of the feed between NASA and the shuttle. In 1992, this was amazing to me.

Nothing interesting happened, we listened to the routine release of some satellite, but it was exciting and cool. Definitely a geek thing to do.

Today someone noted on Twitter that Nancy A was posting regarding a potential issue with the ISS. A piece of debris, possibly part of an Iridium satellite, might hit the ISS. I checked out the feed, and there were updates every minute or so as information came in. The astronauts moved into a Russian capsule for awhile, but the danger passed with no issues.

A very cool use of Twitter, and a little exciting. Definitely had me hitting “refresh” on my Twirl client for a few minutes.