As part of the Spacecraft Operations lecture TUBIN is “relaunched” and the students are running a complete LEOP, Commissioning and Norminal Operations phase. The satellite should currently transmit its beacon and during the coming days extensive testing is conducted over the Berlin ground station, with both day and night passes.
Launch Event can be viewed at Launch Event 2BIN - YouTube
I’ve scheduled a couple of observations of TUBIN in Network, to cover the “relaunch”!
Over the weekend we finished the LEOP phase and are now in the commissioning. After commissioning the gyros, magnettorquer and reaction wheels on the weekend, yesterday we conducted the first target pointing and captured an image of the Earth horizon. Up until now we only used UHF and therefore downloaded the image only as a preview image with drastically reduced size.
Today we are starting with the S band commissioning (that might be interesting for @PE0SAT as you asked for that). During our first Berlin pass we will upload a target pointing list for the second pass and shortly will turn the Hispico transmitters on to check their power consumption. The second pass will then be used to transmit actual payload data (the image from yesterday in higher resolution) and if we have time some telemetry.
Thanks, we will be monitoring S-band
Can you share some details on the S-band transmitter, we now have 2.266 GHz as freq but what modulation type is used ?
Sorry for not answering for so long, I am not sure about the modulation type. 2BIN has two IQ Spacecom HiSPiCO transmitters at 2.263 and 2.266 GHz. Maybe there are more information about the modulation in the two papers linked on the HISPICO project website? All I currently know is that the protocol used is proprietary and (as I heard) can not be understand easily.
On other notes, the commissioning of the subsystems goes along well. On the weekend the Fibre-Optic gyroscopes were commissioned and are now used for attitude control to know the angular rates more precisely than with the normal MEMS gyroscopes. Also the star tracker are currently in commissioning with first results looking promising. Today we turned on the XLink transmitter for the first time allowing us to download images much faster. As it uses CCSDS for the protocol the images should be decodable more easily than over S band (see above) or UHF (very slow). Some coming experiments for this week includes continuation of star tracker commissioning, first infrared images and verifying the attitude precision with more images.