SelfieSat’s operators have announced today that the satellite captured its first image and could start its regular imaging sessions soon (hence its name), so it looks like the initial problems with its ground station have been fixed. SelfieSat has four(!) cameras in total, this image has been captured by one the three non-selfie cameras on the spacecraft’s body.
Observations of this satellite using SatNOGS stations that are within the SelfieSat ground station range (see pdf above or image below) should therefore have a chance of recording an image downlink.
As of now it is unclear whether the operators will announce imaging sessions ahead of time, or if a downlink format will be published. Assuming that said format isn’t too weird, once a usable observation containing an image downlink is obtained I will attempt to add image decoding support to my cubesat-jpeg decoder, alongside Lucky-7 and Geoscan-Edelveis
As far as I can tell, this is the only observation that has captured a data downlink to the SelfieSat ground station: https://network.satnogs.org/observations/6826333/
Even then it is incomplete and only started as the observation was ending.
This is an observation of when the satellite was in “emergency” mode, you can view the data as ASCII and it will just read out “SelfieSatSelfieSatSelfieSat…” all over again. It appears the team gained proper control of the satellite only recently, and so far no long space to ground dump has been captured by the network.
I downloaded all of the data from the dump observation via a custom python workaround (SatNogs doesn’t allow downloading data from satellites that are not coordinated) and here is how the dump looks… all filler
Interestingly enough, the packets are spread out through the observation, rather than just being clustered together as one might expect. A “slow dump??!”
