CTIM’s launch was successful a little over 3 months ago, and after commissioning we have been able to begin conducting nominal science on the spacecraft! We have begun to compare our solar irradiance measurements to larger sun-observing satellites like TSIS-1, and it seems that the science payload is behaving beautifully.
The SatNOGs dashboard has been incredibly useful to our team, and I have been steadily updating it with more panels and descriptions of what the panels mean. I am so grateful to everyone who is catching CTIM packets while it is flying around out of view of our ground station. There are a lot of interesting moments that have been caught, including spacecraft resets (see, for example, 10/04 – the spacecraft hit an undervoltage condition and put itself into a safe sun-pointing mode). If anyone has questions about the satellite or what the different telemetry points mean, please ask away!
On a related note, if you find the idea of working with satellites like CTIM interesting, we have a job opening for a Senior Ground Station Engineer here at LASP. The ground station here sends commands to our cubesats over UHF (and catches beacons while the cubesat is overhead), and collects our science data downlinks over S-band. We are currently interviewing a few candidates but are still accepting applications in the meantime!