Are you game for some gaming?
Well, that's essentially what a team of ham radio operators asked an experimental CubeSat earlier this year, transmitting voice commands from their ground station in Oslo, Norway. The response from the small European Space Agency spacecraft, was yes.
The satellite, known as OPS-SAT PRETTY, then fulfilled the request by starting up the video game Doom.
What sounds like a trivial incident, however, marked an important milestone. That moment in July is believed to be the first time a command was transmitted by voice, instead of digital packets, and carried out successfully by a satellite. Using the callsign LA4O, the Oslo Group of the Norwegian Radio Relay League had achieved their success with the help of earlier tests by hams in Poland using the callsigns SQ6RDP and SQ6QV.
Scientists are taking a fresh look recently at this demonstration of machine learning, in which OPS-SAT PRETTY copied the transmitted signal and transcribed the voice command using speech-to-text AI.
It's not clear who actually won the game but Tanagra Space, the machine-learning specialists behind the experiment, believes everyone might come up ahead of the game. That's especially true with regard to distress calls that are on a grand - or global - scale.
The company's founder and principal investigator Georges Labrèche, told SpaceNews: [quote] “Maybe this could be turned into a service where suddenly you can point to the air, call out for mayday and then a network of satellites is able to relay that immediately.” [endquote]
That hardly sounds like a recipe for Doom.
