Orbit day 5 — more beacons and more commands

Label on the door to the control room

We’ve now got automation of the ground station working thanks to the development work of Colden Rouleau. We ran some passes with this automation software last night and verified that it worked. Now we don’t have to have the whole team show up from midnight to 10 AM local time every day. We think we’re narrowing in on the reason we’re only getting intermittent beacons and commands through. It’s all to do with center frequency and the bandwidth of uplink commands. We’re starting to characterize both systematically using a combination of MinXSS flight model 2 (turning out to be really useful to have a second copy on the ground for this kind of testing) and running multiple passes with only 1 thing changed at a time. The TLE (orbit) information seems to be really good now. The predicted time for loss-of-signal is spot on with the last beacon received.