CuPID status / update

I’ve been staying in touch with the CuPID team at Boston University over the last several month and they’ve asked me to send their thanks to the SatNOGS community in helping to monitor their mission since its launch. They are still trying to activate CuPID’s beacon as it passes over their ground station.

The only observed signal, as thought to be by the CuPID team, was SatNOGS observation by VA6RPI on Oct 8, 2021 in Alberta Canada although it was well outside their ground station’s range:

https://network.satnogs.org/observations/4833174/

No direct verified contact with CuPID has been made to date.

In January , they deployed a team with a mobile ground station to Fairbanks, Alaska, USA for a week in hopes for a better chance with contact at a higher latitude given the polar orbit of CuPID – but no luck.

The most recent update that I have is that their team has reduced their schedule for uplink attempts to just ‘daytime’ passes (approx 14:00 - 16:00 UTC range) on Monday and Wednesdays as CuPID passes within range for their ground station (northeast USA/Canada). Will post here with any new info if it becomes available.

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Wondering if we and the satellite team follows the right NORAD object.

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good point. that would explain a lot. It doesn’t help that this one doesn’t have a cw beacon every 60 seconds for ID, for example. But it could also be in a rapid tumble or 1000 other things.