CYGNUS 12 - HuskySat-1, SwampSat-2, Orbital Factory 2, EdgeCube deployment | 2020-01-31 - 2020-02-01

HuskySat is scheduled to be released from the Cygnus sometime this week (Friday at the earliest). Has anybody provided info to the SatNogs team so that the transmitter(S) can be set up? Here is an old release from ARRL that has some details:

http://www.arrl.org/news/huskysat-1-successfully-lifted-into-space

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There are already opened issues https://gitlab.com/librespacefoundation/satnogs-ops/issues?scope=all&utf8=âś“&state=opened&search=huskysat we are on solving them. Thanks!

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I have moved this thread to Launches category and also added SwampSat-2 at the title. Both satellites are in DB:

  • HuskySat-1 with temporary norad id 99824
  • SwampSat-2 with temporary norad id 99825

Transmitters have been suggested and will be approved in the next couple of minutes.

According to this tweet:


HuskySat-1 and (I assume) SwampSat-2 are going to be deployed at 2020-01-31 22:30UTC and beacon should begin transmitting at 23:05UTC.

Scheduling has been done starting from 22:30 and it was done using ISS TLE. As these are preliminary TLE, I’ve scheduled observations only for the first 12h and with Custom 0 degrees horizon for all the stations. Observations have been split to cover both satellites.

Objects 45043 and 44701 looks like good candidates for getting better TLE for these two deployments. Checking…

From my quick analysis, for now they are too close in terms of observation with ISS so no need to re-schedule. Here is my analysis, please verify it or let me know if I missed something:

The latest cygnus TLE:
CYGNUS NG-12
1 44701U 19071A 20031.75718321 .03441816 00000-0 55180-1 0 9991
2 44701 51.6423 308.4630 0004142 217.4538 193.9436 15.48476446 13989

Which means that the epoch of the set is ~ 2020-01-31 18:10 UTC (20031.75718321: 20 is 2020, 031 is 31st of January, 0.75718321 of 24h/day ~= 18.17h ~= 18:10). This epoch is after the separation which happened at least 5h ago (~15:00).

So ISS TLE should be good for now, however maybe newer TLE will come out for Cygnus, so I’ll keep watching them. Please let me know if you find any other info about the TLE, so I can re-schedule observations if necessary.

Accidentally I scheduled the transponder instead of the transmitter of HuskySat-1. I’ve just fixed that, so the future observations will be for the Telemetry transmitter. By the way there is a report that probably is HuskySat-1:

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I just listened to a pass over NA - I think it’s about 5 minutes behind the ISS.

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The first good receptions from HuskySat-1 in Network:
https://network.satnogs.org/observations/?future=0&bad=0&unvetted=0&failed=0&norad=99824&observer=&station=&start=&end=2020-02-01+01%3A40

Unfortunately nothing yet from SwampSat-2.

ISS TLE that were used seems to be off a couple of minutes as @K3RLD noted, hopefully soon we will have some first TLE.

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AMSATs nasabare.txt has been updated with tle’s that are pretty close.

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Thanks, I have updated the TLE for both satellites.

I have re-scheduled some of the observations as the new TLE have a significant difference.

EDIT: During rescheduling I didn’t notice that some of the initial observations were selected, so now they are removed. :frowning: I’m really sorry about that, it was my fault, I’m going to add functionality that will prevent that kind of accidents in the future.

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Pay attention, telemetry will be transmitted on BPSK1k2.
New TLE from http://www.amsat.org/amsat/ftp/keps/current/nasabare.txt

HuskySat-1
1 99934U 1001D 20031.87746807 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 13
2 99934 51.5569 307.6644 0013532 287.5589 72.3913 15.32433103 16

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There are 5 new objects (45113-45117), I’ve added TLE from 45113 for both HuskySat-1 and SwampSat-2. Still the objects are near each other, so we need to wait for NORAD ID assignment. Thanks to @PE0SAT for bring this in my attention.

45117 Object seems to fit better the HuskySat-1 signals:

So I’ve changed the used TLE for HuskySat-1 to follow 45117.

“45117 Object” really good for the HuskySat-1:


but for the SwampSat-2 should be another:

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SwampSat-2 seems to fit better 45117 too, so I change it to network too in order to check if it is the right one:

45113-45115 are also close, so we will need to keep observing to be sure.

What I’m wondering is which satellites are the rest of the objects. As far as I can say from NASA’s site they shouldn’t be the rest of the ELANA cubesats, however I didn’t found any other information about deployments.

Link I found and shared when they first launched up to the ISS. Has a few more Sats that might be of interest. Some are also on board the ISS and not on the Nano Rack deployed on the Cygnus

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Thanks, there are issues open for getting the rest of them in DB and add their transmitters based on that post you have written. Let me know if I missed something.

From the latest observations and calculations SwampSat-2 should be one of 45113, 45114 and 45115. I’ve chosen to follow 45114 for now in network.