We took MinXSS outside! This was a really cool test. We wanted to know how much filtering we needed on our solar position sensor so that the electronics wouldn’t get saturated with signal. The Sun is bright! To figure it out, we could’ve done a bunch of modeling, spreadsheets, signal estimation… or just go outside and see what signal we get! This was a truly impressive test of how well we have the CubeSat and support systems functioning. There were no cables in the CubeSat. It was running purely on battery, running all of the electronics and instruments, sending data and receiving commands from the onboard radio to our ground station. The next step was also extremely cool: the ground station posted the science data to a socket that I could connect to with my laptop. You see me holding my laptop there in the picture. We were looking at real time plots being produced in IDL every 3 seconds as MinXSS collected the data. In that way, we were able to get the solar position sensor pointed right at the Sun but just looking at the calculated position of the Sun on the plot on my laptop (see attached screenshot image of the science display).
