About COSMOS
COSMOS is a senior project group at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The primary goal of the COSMOS project is to design, fabricate, and implement a feedback control system for a high gain antenna capable of tracking celestial objects and satellites in earth orbit. This effort requires an antenna pattern characterization, orbital and celestial prediction software, and mechanical analysis and design. Professors, DSES, the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS), the Air Force, and other groups can use the dish for their own studies.
Over the past several years, the Deep Space Exploration Society (DSES), a volunteer organization, has started to renovate retired satellite dishes at Table Mountain, just north of Boulder. The Table Mountain facility includes two 60-ft. dishes and a control station (T-22). DSES also has another identical dish located in Haswell, Colorado which has been abandoned for decades. One main research goal for DSES and others such as Professor George Born is to use these dishes to track celestial objects and satellites in an earth orbit.
The satellite dishes at Table Mountain are currently controlled manually by an operator adjusting voltages. Thus, our objective is to create an integrated control system that will allow safe and easy operation of the dishes. In addition, several aspects of the mechanical and electrical systems currently in place at Table Mountain need to be redesigned or newly added. Once these tasks are accomplished, operators will be able to track celestial objects and earth orbiting satellites through the use of a user-friendly graphical interface. We also hope to have our work serve as a design to be implemented at the dish in Haswell sometime later in the future.
The website is frequently updated with project news, so be sure to check out the Team Weekly Blog and Table Mountain Visit Log for updates on everything that we're doing!
