NG-14/ELaNa 31 Launch and Deployment Information

Satellites & Observations Launches
#11

Almost ready for the deployment. Here are the satellite and their temporary NORAD IDs:

For the teams, please make sure that the details of your satellite and its transmitters are right.

For station owners, these satellites will be available for scheduling tomorrow. As the satellites will be deployed from ISS we will follow ISS TLE for the first couple of days. This means that scheduled passes will overlap with ISS ones.

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#12

It’s perhaps a mistake and they wanted to talk about UHF LORA frequencies. I rem ember you that the picosat FOSSASAT have succesfully transmit on 436.7 MHz with LoRA but unfortunately for a too short time (https://fossa.systems/fossasat-1/). Anyway, an external RX circuit is required to receive but it is very affordable. It should be interesting to know the exact TX frequency.

#13

Hi all,

I have just received update state vectors from NanoRacks.
NRCSD19_SPOC.txt (3.1 KB)
NRCSD19_SAT-LLA.txt (3.1 KB)
NRCSD19_NEUTRON-1.txt (3.1 KB)
NRCSD19_DESCENT.txt (3.1 KB)
NRCSD19_Bobcat-1.txt (3.1 KB)
NRCSD19_ISS_At_Deploy4_DESCENT_SAT-LLA_LEMURv4.7.txt (3.1 KB)
NRCSD19_ISS_At_Deploy2_NEUTRON-1.txt (3.1 KB)
NRCSD19_ISS_At_Deploy1_SPOC_Bobcat-1.txt (3.1 KB)

#14

First scheduling, from deployment to 2020-11-06 23:50 UTC is done, following the deployment timeline given here:

To the station owners:
These passes are overlapped with ISS passes and will do for at least 2 weeks. There are and there will be some free slots left for ISS passes, that may be used for either ISS or scheduling one of the satellites above.

In case you want to change which satellite you want to observe on a future pass on your station, delete the pass/observation and schedule a new one. If you schedule one of the deployed satellites, don’t forget to use custom station horizon in advanced options with value 0, so we can track it better as we don’t have very accurate TLE.

Three comments on the scheduling:

  1. Usually on new deployments we schedule the first 6h hours until we find better, than the preliminary, TLE. In this deployment, TLE are known as the satellites are deployed from ISS. In other words, ISS TLE are pretty accurate for the first days after the deployment.
  2. The difference between the count of observations for each satellite has to do with the deployment time.
  3. As SATLLA-1 uses an unsupported mode (for reasons that @vk5qi explains here) it got almost the half observations comparing to others for SSA purposes.
#15

Its also worth pointing out that due to the very wide bandwidth of the mode compared to the ‘normal’ SatNOGS observation bandwidth (48 kHz), it will be difficult to discriminate SATLLA-1 transmissions from other local noise.

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#16

2 posts were split to a new topic: Identifying LoRa transmissions

#17

One comment for SATLLA-1 (cc’ing @kcglab), SatNOGS DB is able to accept frames from 3rd party (not in SatNOGS Network) stations through SiDS protocol and if a kaitai struct is provided (generated from decoding schema), we will be able to decode them and create a dashboard.

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#18

ISS pass over U.S. East Coast 1205 utc; first 3 objects should be deployed & active if schedule holds.

Only signal seen was Bobcat-1 (VERY strong):

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#19

Currently we have received Bobcat-1 and SPOC with demodulated frames and we manage to decode them and push them to their dashboards:

Unfortunately nothing from NEUTRON-1 yet. There is a possibility to be in deep sleep while recharging its batteries.

#20

After a successful contact this morning, Bobcat-1 appears to be stuck in 9600 baud mode (normal is 1200 baud). You can see this here:
https://network.satnogs.org/observations/3090817/

This is likely just due to setting our timeout too long, it’ll be an easy fix. We’ve changed the rest of the observations starting now till our next pass over OU begins (2020-11-06T04:42:02Z UTC) to be 9600 baud. Additionally, we are going to start increasing our baud rate more to find our highest stable baud rate. So, tonight from 2020-11-06T04:42:02Z to 2020-11-06T04:51:59Z, any observations during this time will observe Bobcat-1 using a 38400 baud transmitter. After this, we’ll go back to our normal 1200 baud beacons.

Our plan for tonight’s 04:42UTC pass is to test the 38400 baud rate and start a science data collection. Once that data collection is done, we’ll be increasing the baud rate as high as we can to download that dataset. Hopefully, we’ll get close to our 100,000 baud target!

Kevin

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#21

we will follow him this night during the pass over europe

#22

New TLE Set for Bobcat-1 and SPOC satellites, generated by @pierros using @cgbsat’s strf:

1 99837U          20310.95833333  .00000000  00000-0  48175-4 0    01
2 99837  51.6464   6.9635 0001675 100.2165  44.0495 15.50085220    01
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#23

We’ll be having a pass over the university ground station from 2020-11-06T04:42:02Z UTC to 2020-11-06T04:51:59Z UTC. We’re planning to resolve the baud rate issue so that Bobcat-1 will be back at 1200 baud, and hopefully start our first science data collection. The current theory as to why our baud rate is stuck at the high level is that the FTP task interrupted the task responsible for changing back the baud rate due to our command sequencing - simply increasing our baud rate change timeout should resolve this issue going forward.

After 11-06 04:51UTC, Bobcat-1 should be back in its 1200 baud beacon mode.

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#24

04:42 - 04:51 UTC pass complete. Downlink is back to 1200 baud FSK and we have started our first science data collection!

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#25

Congratulations for Bobcat-1, can you confirm that the cubesat uses a NanoCom AX100 ?? No signal from Neutron-1 tonight.

#26

Yes, we have a GOMSpace NanoCom AX100 in Mode 5 (ASM+GOLAY). Let me know if you have any more questions!

#27

Currently only SPOC is received. Unfortunately Bobcat-1 has stopped transmitting some hours ago, there will be some attempts from the team to contact it, also if it was a misconfiguration issue it will reset automatically within the next 24-48h.

I’ve scheduled more observations for the next two days for all the satellites, again if any station owner wants to schedule other satellite or ISS pass, please remove and re-schedule.

One more comment, the generated TLE fit very well SPOC and Bobcat-1.

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#28

As a point of information, the bandwidth of SATLLA-1 is set to 62.5 kHz.

#29

I’ve received an email from the US Space Force:

Kevin,

 

We have preliminary orbits for the satellites now – they’re in what we call “analyst” status, which means we’re tracking them but are waiting for more tracking data to firm up the orbits before they go into the catalog.  The crew believes one of two objects is Bobcat-1, and I’ve attached the TLEs for both of them.  85xxx numbers are used for analysts, and will be replaced by “normal” numbers when they go into the catalog.

 

The crew will be working over the weekend, so hopefully we’ll start getting them into the catalog by Monday.  In the meantime, you can take a look at the TLEs and let me know if you can identify one as Bobcat-1.  Take your time, no hurry.

 

Congrats on your new satellite!

Cynthia

These are the two files that Cynthia shared:
85416.tle.txt (329 Bytes)
85419.tle.txt (162 Bytes)

#30

… which is wider than 48 kHz, hence the issue. The bandwidth has been mentioned a few times in the other thread: Identifying LoRa transmissions