Co-design of a new cubesat mission?

The mentoring team for the RamSat mission is beginning to think about how we can facilitate a next student-driven mission. The SatNOGS community has contributed tremendously to the success of our current mission, and we would like to gain a deeper understanding of how we can “give back”. What can a team like ours do to make a cubesat mission exciting, educational, and fun for this awesome community? Let’s dream big together!

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You could release all of the work that you do available under free software licenses, such as the GPL.

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Images!

In a world of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, we could use more beautiful images (Visual, infrared, etc) of the earth, the sun, planets, stars, and selfies of the Cubesat in space! Satnogs is good in receiving telemetry data, but I think it would be awesome if the ground stations can receive (parts of) images, and we can show them to the world!

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@jebba: great suggestion! As part of our commitment to NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, we just completed a project Final Report. The flight software repository was made public when the report was submitted, and I just added a GPL license to the flight software on github:
thorntonpe/RamSat_flight: Flight software for RamSat mission (github.com)
We have developed some custom code for our ground station, and we plan to make that open as well, after some further iteration.

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@EelkeVisser Yes! I love the idea of selfies. We also made some decisions about imaging for our first mission that I would do differently for a second mission. We use jpg format, which means it is hard to generate partial images as packets accumulate. We also did not include reduced-resolution thumbnails, and having those would have helped to focus downlink effort. SatNOGS stations are receiving many of our image packets, and I tried to get something worked out that would allow us to at least get a count of the number of image packets received as part of our dashboard, but that turned out to be difficult. It would be great to revisit that, and plan our packet formats to make the best use of dashboard technology.

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Thanks for sharing this “thank you” towards the community and also good to see the mission is a succes. Below some options for the next mission.

Some examples:

Add the options so the satellite can be used as a repeater, linear transponder or store forward system?
Try to see if it is possible to send sstv or ssdv images?
Interact with the community, send text where you messages where you share the tremendous succes thanks to the community.
Please make sure all the communication information is available so we can be successful in decoding the data and sharing it with the mission team.

Regards, Jan PE0SAT

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Possibly a better downlink design?

Perhaps live DVB-S2 video, or at least an S-band downlink (possibly BPSK or QPSK with a higher data rate) with higher-resolution images!

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