Grupa: Użytkownik
Posty: 550 #8336361
Od: 2009-5-12
Ilość edycji wpisu: 1 | “Space Sailors” Seeking Download Help
A group of students at Cornell University is asking hams equipped with satellite stations for help in listening for signals from a retroreflective laser sail that was deployed yesterday, December 3, 2025. The sail was unfurled from a 1U CubeSat that was launched December 2 from the International Space Station. It is equipped with four tiny “ChipSat” flight computers that are transmitting telemetry data back to Earth with only 100 milliwatts of power. Several dozen telemetry packets have already been received and decoded by stations in Europe and Asia. Additional “ears” are sought because drag created by the sail in low Earth orbit will limit its functional time to no more than 48 hours.
This is the first flight of these ChipSats, and it is this data that the students seek help detecting, according to Ph.D. candidate Joshua Umansky-Castro, KD2WTQ. The light sail’s ChipSats are transmitting using the LoRa® digital protocol on 437.400 MHz.
Close-up photos of the ChipSat transceiver attached to the light sail. The ChipSats are solar-powered and transmit telemetry data using LoRa® at 100 milliwatts on 437.400 MHz. [Photo courtesy of Cornell University.]
Data is being collected on the TinyGS project webpage, which is also posting updates on progress. Additional information, including LoRa parameters and links to a list of compatible receivers and the decoder file, may be found at alphacubesat.cornell.edu in the ChipSat Ground Station Guide (.docx).
It is hoped that the ChipSat and light sail will become the trailblazer for future missions around the solar system, and one day to our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri.
https://tinygs.com/satellite/CornellLightSail |
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