Today we brought the CubeSat and some support equipment up to Davidson Mesa — a pull-off of Highway 36 right at the hill coming into Boulder. From there, the CubeSat has a clear view of the ground station on the roof of LASP. We booted up the CubeSat and saw that it really did wait 30 minutes before doing anything (as required by NASA for CubeSats). Right on time, the antenna rolled out of the CubeSat! We worked out a few bugs in the communication and then checked on the health and safety of the spacecraft. It all looked pretty good! This “end-to-end” test is a great way to boost confidence that when we get kicked out in space, things will work just like we expect them to… and just as importantly, that we’ll be able to debug any issues quickly having seen all kinds of behavior before.
(photo left to right: Rick Kohnert, Tom Woods, MinXSS flight model 1, James Mason)