BUGSAT-1 is usually a consisitent performer with solid decodes on every pass at my station- but looking at the telemetry dashboard, we haven’t seen a frame come in since Observation 8590892 on 25 Nov '23. Going forward through observations there’s a valid-looking signal in Observation 8591037 which didn’t decode and (so far) I haven’t spotted anything after. To my admittedly untrained eye there are no obvious anomalies in the data when compared with the last several months. So- what do we think?
not sure, vetting a few and spotting possible signs.
https://network.satnogs.org/observations/8625537/
https://network.satnogs.org/observations/8610884/
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Looks like a pretty serious difference between predicted and actual Doppler if that’s the case.
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So far no more signes of it. I had a look to many observations since few days, no more signals. I don’t find any information online neither. TLEs from other sources still are the same as the one that SatNOGS use.
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The TLE sets seems to be updated normally and regularly. From a quick check (checked a couple of them) on the last good observations on 2023-11-25, I didn’t notice any drift that would explain non good TLE sets.
It looks like it stopped instantaneously. So, I would add two scenarios that could be easily checked, maybe a strong magnetic storm or passing through the South Atlantic Anomaly may have affected the satellite.
Good point! Having looked a bit, there’s been a fair amount of geomagnetic storming over the last few weeks, and NOAA SWPC’s high latitude K index was all the way up to 7 at one point on the 25th according to the 30-day history here and Potsdam (warning: big honkin’ text file going back to 1932) recorded an overall Kp of 6.3 although overall storming never rose above G3. There’s some correlation there, just not the sort of big numbers I associate with serious problems on a bus.
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I haven’t seen a valid decode since the end of November. Absent any objections from the community, I will mark the transmitter inactive next week.
Indeed it is off since then, feel free to suggest the change earlier than the next week.
I wonder if the team is still active and if any attempts at recovery have been attempted?
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Maybe we can try to e-mail them?
I remember it was sending some e-mail address in beacon:
†¢@@@@`˜ªn‚‚áð:EMAIL :tita@satellogic.com Upt: 08:26:04 Bat:11.10v Temp:55.5C Gyr:1.94d/s
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I received the following answer from Satellogic:
We are still trying to conclude, from the data (same as you have), what happened to BugSat-1.
We have not made any changes, so anything that had happened is just a result of time (or other forces).
It’s still orbiting, but mute and deaf
Lets keep monitoring and wait what the future will bring.
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Sad news!
Thank you for letting us know!
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Not great news but definitely a solid update. Thanks for taking the social media initiative! As long as Satellogic are still looking for data, I support keeping it active in the database.