Hi all,
Just a friendly update from the SmallSat operations (SMOPS) team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
At around 11:35-45 AM MST (UTC-7), the SMOPS team disabled beaconing on the CSIM instrument. This was for two reasons:
- In around early February of this year (2022), a flash memory failure on board the spacecraft resulted in the instrument becoming inoperable. The spacecraft bus was still operable (i.e., the EPS, C&DH, communications systems, ADCS, etc.), but the CSIM science team was unable to continue gathering data. The SMOPS team made various efforts to try to work-around the failure, but to no avail.
- The SMOPS team realized that CSIM’s FCC license had lapsed for some time–our last license (FCC file number 0867-EX-CN-2017, callsign WJ2XGL) had expired on May 1 of 2020.
The SMOPS team is uncertain as to if commands which would commit this change (i.e., to disable beaconing) to flash were successful, so beaconing will be temporarily re-enabled while the spacecraft is directly Boulder, CO tomorrow morning to verify that beaconing is permanently disabled in both flash and RAM.
So, to any of those who may have scheduled observations of CSIM, once we’re certain that the beacon is disabled, there would be no utility in continuing to schedule observations–that time could better be spent scheduling observations for other satellites.
Thanks to all who helped collect CSIM beacons during the past ~three years–I see 333,122 frames on the CSIM dashboard!
– Nick
Nicholas DeCicco
Professional Research Assistant
Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics
814 13th St
Boulder, CO
