The more NyanSat ground stations are out there, the more they can do together, communicating with known satellites or even probing the more stealthy or unknown objects orbiting the Earth. Individual NyanSat base stations don't have to work as part of a collective and share data, but in many ways the devices have more potential as part of community research than as individual instruments. There's already an active Discord channel where people are getting their base stations up and running and discussing ideas for long-term projects.
"Let’s say we have 1,000 of these base stations distributed across North America," says Cui. "If you could shine a radar beam into the sky not knowing if something is there or not, the chances that it's reflected back to you, the sender, would be astronomically small. But if we have thousands of base stations all listening, they could amplify and correlate from whichever station hears the bounce back to find debris or other objects you wouldn't know are up there."
Video: WIRED StaffWhile the NyanSat project promises an impressively cheap ground station, it isn't the only way to hunt for space debris or undocumented satellites in orbit. Groups of amateur observers have been tracking spy satellites for decades. There's precedent, too, for creating a low-cost, decentralized, open source ground station networks. A project known as SatNOGS, founded in 2014 during the NASA Space App Challenge hackathon, does similar work and has more than 60 deployed ground stations around the world. SatNOGS is run through a larger organization called the Libre Sp ..
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