The Systems Engineering Society
12/9/2002
Written By Peter Hinckley

 


This, the very first photograph to be sent directly to sites on the Internet from the North Pole via satellite, shows Wil Steger and the IAC Polar Expedition as they reach the North Pole.

This historic photo was taken with a Kodak DC-40 digital camera, encoded and uplinked to a basketball sized Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) Satellite put up by the University of Surrey in England. On this occasion, we downlinked at SpaceQuest (Virginia) from which the photo was transmitted over terrestrial internet links to it's final destination at the Systems Engineering Society and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in Toronto.

Other Project participants included SatelLife (Cambridge, MA) who provided time on the satellite and special thanks to Mark Kanawadi from SpaceQuest, who designed the hand held transmitter employed.

The transmitter was designed initially for the Weber Malakhov Expedition. The entire package (transmitter, HP hand held PC, antennae and batteries) weighed only 5 pounds.