S4 Crossover - Astra Rocket LV0009 - 2022-03-13 16:00 UTC

Hello all,

Greetings from the OreSat team!

I’m kicking off the Astra LV0009. There are a few cubesat missions on this launch, some that I believe I am not allowed to name. The one most notably (to me) is OreSat0!

 

Here’s a starting point of details about OreSat. Feel free to contribute to this as well, I’m just kicking this off with the details I know for sure I’m allowed to share.

Astra LV0009 (S4 Crossover)

Launch Provider: Astra Space INC.
Approx Datetime: 20-03-2022 at around 1600 UTC
RocketLaunch Live Link

CubeSat Missions:

OreSat0 (Portland State University)

  • “Hand-Crafted” and “Artisanal” cubesats by the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS)
  • IARU Coordinatiuon
  • Official Mission Statement: [T]o provide flight heritage to the “OreSat bus”, an open source card-cage based system that is ideally suited for education CubeSat projects involving interdisciplinary teams of students
    • i.e. don’t catch fire in space!
    • This is a tech demonstration/flight heritage mission and the first in hopefully a long line of future OreSat cubesats

 

Cheers,
- Dmitri, KO4VTR

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Oresat0 is added with the temporary NORAD ID 99410 in DB and will be available in Network for scheduling as soon as we have TLE set.

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Astra Launch LV0009 has been pushed back to March 14th at approximately 1600 UTC.

See: S4 Crossover Mission (Rocket 3) - RocketLaunch.Live

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Astra Space Rocket 3 rocket will launch the S4 Crossover mission on Tuesday, March 15, 2022 at 4:22 PM (UTC)

Latest S4 Crossover information.

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Preliminary TLE by @EelkeVisser for ORESAT0:

1 99410U 22025A   22074.68541667  .00000000  00000-0  50000-4 0    04
2 99410  97.5000  74.4713 0001449   0.0000 121.6000 15.13677675    08
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ORESAT0 is now received! We had some observations earlier without decoded data that looked like ORESAT0 but now we have confirmed frames SatNOGS Network - Observation 5626461.

Congratulations @dmitri3!

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TLE from the team:

ORESAT0
1 99410U 22025A   22074.68819444  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0 00006
2 99410 097.4952 075.8532 0018835 235.9892 262.7747 15.13285052000012

DB and Network are now updated with it.

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FYI, I had to do a lot of manual freq. adjustment using that last TLE on the 2225utc pass over the Eastern U.S. An omni antenna saved the day; my other SDR w/ a directional gain antenna got ZERO decodes w/ the AZ/EL tracking so far off. But thanks for posting to get us in the ballpark!

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There is a TBA TLE set from spacetrack but probably is for the rocket, so I think we should wait for the rest TLE sets of the payloads.

0 TBA - TO BE ASSIGNED
1 52008U 22026A   22074.85993601 -.00000076  00000-0  00000+0 0  9996
2 52008  97.4876  76.0311 0047855 273.3898  86.1124 15.20642101    32

Yes, the 52008 runs well ahead of that OreSat-1 TLE, so it’s too distant to be a possibility, I think.

oresat0-pre

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New TLE sets for the launch by spacetrack:

0 OBJECT A
1 52008U 22026A   22075.25477148 -.00000074  00000-0  00000+0 0  9992
2 52008  97.4837  76.4198 0044362 263.1841  94.3282 15.19112769    93
0 TBA - TO BE ASSIGNED
1 52009U 22026B   22075.54007465 -.00000067  00000-0  00000+0 0  9998
2 52009  97.5062  76.6867 0026294 231.6045 227.2225 15.13608282   122
0 TBA - TO BE ASSIGNED
1 52010U 22026C   22075.54006270 -.00000067  00000-0  00000+0 0  9993
2 52010  97.5059  76.6816 0026343 232.9128 225.6925 15.13560168   135

According to @EelkeVisser analysis while he was generating a TLE set, it looks like that 52010 is ORESAT0. However 52009 is also close, so we will wait for some more detailed analysis to make sure. Until then we use 52010 for following ORESAT0 in DB and Network.

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20 TLE sets until now for this launch and all of the assigned to objects by spacetrack. From all of these 52012-52014 seems to be the better fits for now (thanks @EelkeVisser for the analysis), so we are going to use 52013 for the next hours/days in DB and Network.

According to this video:

22 satellites were deployed.

https://twitter.com/TGMetsFan98/status/1504538580261249028

Swarm Technologies CTO confirms that 20 SpaceBEE satellites were also on board the Spaceflight Inc Astra-1 mission:

Unfortunately links to a deleted tweet but fortunately kept the message :slight_smile:

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Using the observations of Oresat0 on the 1382 - ITR UHF station, I measured the doppler:

Using the last 5 passes I get the following matches:

rms limit (kHz): 0.2
52009 0.174 kHz 436.500177 MHz
52012 0.193 kHz 436.499973 MHz
52013 0.170 kHz 436.500083 MHz
52014 0.163 kHz 436.500123 MHz
52015 0.186 kHz 436.500232 MHz
52016 0.193 kHz 436.500249 MHz
52017 0.198 kHz 436.500261 MHz
52018 0.196 kHz 436.500245 MHz
Identified 8 candidate(s), best fitting satellite is 52014.

The doppler difference is very small, and the objects are very close to each other. We are currently following 52013 for Oresat0, which is not bad, but 52014 might be a slightly better match. But due such small differences, this conclusion might change in the next few days. I’ll keep watching.

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52014 or 52012? Looking at your frequency chart, 52012 has a smaller delta from transmission frequency. These differences are indeed very small. I imagine a higher transmission rate would help narrow it down.

Impressive work!

Hi Kenny, it is not about the absolute frequency. I don’t know how accurate the sdr of this station is, and also the frequency of the satellite can be a bit off. If you look at the second column you find the rms error of the measured doppler points against the different objects. The 52014 has 0.163 kHz error and 52012 has 0.193 kHz. Hence the doppler of 52014 matches better with the measurements. All the objects are still flying very close to each other, it takes time for them to drift apart and make the doppler fit easier. Thanks for reaching out! :smiley:

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Ahh, that makes much more sense. Is this code posted somewhere? I bet I could learn a bunch from it. Thanks for your time and careful analysis!

We are going a bit off topic, and for further discussion should start a new thread. But yes, this is @cgbsat’s STRF. It can be found here:

It has a steep learning curve, this course of @EA4GPZ is very helpful:
https://destevez.net/2019/01/an-strf-crash-course/

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The last 4 observations of station 1382:

Gives a best fit for 52014:

rms limit (kHz): 0.3
52009 0.250 kHz 436.500540 MHz
52012 0.269 kHz 436.500095 MHz
52013 0.205 kHz 436.500435 MHz
52014 0.187 kHz 436.500368 MHz
52015 0.278 kHz 436.500588 MHz
52017 0.198 kHz 436.500380 MHz
85416 0.230 kHz 436.500417 MHz
85417 0.226 kHz 436.500382 MHz
Identified 8 candidate(s), best fitting satellite is 52014.

Just like 5 days ago, 52014 is the best match.

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