Orbit day 2

Image credit: NASA and James Paul Mason

Today we had 6 passes over Boulder, more beacon data sent to us from friends worldwide, and temperature stabilization of the spacecraft. The Air Force identified two new objects near the space station. For you radio operators out there, their numeric IDs are 41474 and 41475. You can use either one because the objects (MinXSS and CADRE) are only about 3 seconds apart right now. They are both about 60 seconds ahead of the space station. Using this information, we think we’ve got our frequency fairly well locked down (437.345 MHz, maybe + 1 kHz) and are getting pretty consistent beacons, at least on the descending phase of passes.

The battery and solar panels continue to perform well. The attitude control system is still pointing us at the sun to within a few degrees, as expected. We still haven’t gotten any commands into the spacecraft. We did discover a few small problems with our ground station that may have added up to a big enough reason for commands to be too “quiet” for the spacecraft to hear. We’ll test out that theory tonight, starting at about 1:30 AM tonight.

The photo above is a zoomed in shot taken from an astronaut on the ISS that James Mason did a CSI-like license plate enhancement on to make the engraved names of everyone who worked on the project more visible.