I am opening this thread to provide updates on the REAL CubeSat mission that was launched alongside TRACERS in late July of this year. For a little background information, REAL is a CubeSat developed by Darthmouth College and Montana State University carrying an instrument built by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. REAL stands for Relativistic Electron Atmospheric Loss.
The support from the SatNOGS community since the launch has been incredible! We have found incredible value in the observations provided by the community, and we are very grateful for everyone who has made an effort to listen to our satellite.
Our team has been busy establishing consistent communications with REAL and then beginning commissioning. We are really close to having completed minimum science goals. As part of our thank you to this community, we wanted to work with the SatNOGS team to get a telemetry dashboard set up on REAL’s database page and/or a place we can post a decoder script for the community to use on their own.
We have an outdated description of our ground station on the ground station page of our website. If someone on our team can make time, then we will get it updated to better reflect our current setup.
The SSEL team has made a few modifications to gpredict that allow connections to the GNURadio flowgraph. These connections provide Doppler correction and automation in the selection of satellites actively being tracked in gpredict.
that is very cool project. same soul with libre space and open source movement. love that!
I thought I would pass along another update on REAL’s progress.
In the time since my last update we have made upgrades to our ground station which has dramatically improved the performance of our system and made passes of the satellite more reliable for uplink and downlink. I will update the website I linked in an earlier comment when I have time with our new hardware.
REAL has been chirping along amazingly for the last 10 weeks. We are now operating with our eyes on fulfilling our full mission goals. We have seen a lot of data come in from our instrument and what our scientists have been saying is filled with excitement.
I would like to extend yet another thank you to the Libre Space and SatNOGS community! Our satellite is far from perfect and likes to act up from time to time, especially the UHF radio. Being able to see our beacons being picked up by SatNOGS members elsewhere in the world has led to many a stress-relieving sigh from our team members.
Speaking of beacons, it took longer than we anticipated, but there are now packet definitions up on REAL’s SatNOGS DB page. We are looking to continue working with the community and build a Grafana dashboard for our beacons. We have just started and are still learning about that process, so any tips on how we can be involved with the community on that process is appreciated!
