Hello, does anyone have any updates regarding the status of the Chimera-Geo-1 mission? Members of AMSAT-DL had been monitoring the mission using the Bochum radio telescope; however, the latest information available dates back to early April. Any recent developments or insights would be greatly appreciated.
Chimera GEO1 is still alive, but becoming a deep space object rather than ending up in GEO orbit. Due to the increasing distance and a radio design not well suitable for deep space communication, signal strength at the Bochum 20m dish or other dishes in the 32m class like Goonhilly is getting beyond being decodable.
Another challenge is to knowing where the spacecraft is located in space. The GEO1 communication design is based on an off-the-shelf commercial CubeSat radio for LEO/GEO and not designed for deep space communication, missing required frequency stability and ranging capabilities for accurate orbit determination. Telemetry is most of the time only transmitted once a minute or so, making it also time consuming and difficult to steer the antenna with manual offsets. All this is also very time consuming and doing it on a entire voluntary basis has its limits.
We closely supported the GEO1 team from Bochum since launch, in particular when it was recovered from their (contracted) ground station problems. Due to these early problems, GEO1 already lost the point of returning to earth, when running out of time for an orbital burn when flying-by Moon.
The good news is, that GEO1 is still surprisingly healthy and all subsystems have been successfully tested. So, good hopes for the upcoming GEO2 and a lot of lessons learned by EPIC Aerospace.
BTW: There is a similar story about the involvement of AMSAT-DL and Bochum dish with the ODIN Mission. AstroForge
73 de Peter
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Hi Peter,
I greatly appreciate the information regarding the status of the mission.Incredible all the work that all of you are doing and understand the silence from the ship’s owners. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs tend to underestimate the importance of RF equipment, only to face the consequences later in space.
73 de Gustavo.
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