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Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket carrying the Cygnus cargo spacecraft lifted off at 4:44 a.m. EDT and is on its way to the International Space Station. At the time of launch, the space station was traveling at an altitude of about 250 miles, over the central south Atlantic.
An hour and half after launch, commands will be given to deploy the spacecraft’s UltraFlex solar arrays. Launch coverage will resume on NASA TV at http://www.nasa.gov/live at about 5:45 a.m. for solar array deployment, which is expected to last about 30 minutes.
A post-launch news conference will follow and is scheduled to begin on NASA TV at approximately 7:00 a.m.
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Mark Garcia
ISS
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NASA Image of the Day
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DSLWP is a lunar formation flying mission led by Harbin Institute of Technology for low frequency radio astronomy, amateur radio and education. It consists of a pair of 47 kg microsatellites, to be launched into a lunar transfer orbit UTC this Sunday evening, and finally enter a 300 x 9000km lunar elliptical orbit. Onboard each satellite, there are two VHF/UHF SDR transceivers to provide beacon, telemetry, telecommand, digital image downlink and a GMSK-JT4 repeater. Onboard transmitting power is about 2 W.
Wei Mingchuan BG2BHC reports the satellites are 50x50x40 cm with a mass of about 45 kg and are 3-axis stabilized. Two linear polarization antennas are mounted along and normal to the flight direction.
Harbin Institute of Technology Amateur Radio Club expects radio amateurs to join in this mission. We will prepare different QSL cards for different flight phase for amateurs successfully made QSO or received telemetry. Awards will also be given to the first 10 amateurs in each continent who successfully decoded the signals from the satellites, received the most number of packets, or received an image. Your participation will also help the team to get a better knowledge of the status of the satellites.
An open source decoding software based on GNU Radio to work with RTL-SDR and USRP is provided. Not difficult to change the grc files to support other SDR receivers. A small proxy software will send the decoded data to a server for real-time display.
IARU frequency coordination page:
http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/finished_detail.php?serialnum=530
Link budgets: http://lilacsat.hit.edu.cn/wp/?page_id=676
Decoder (GNU Radio OOT module): https://github.com/bg2bhc/gr-dslwp
Decoder (Linux Live CD): https://1drv.ms/u/s!Av6J6WjI3UbMhHm8gwMr4Z_keqWH
TLE: http://lilacsat.hit.edu.cn/tle/dslwp.txt
DSLWP-A Telemetry Display: http://lilacsat.hit.edu.cn/dashboard/pages_en/telemetry-a.html
DSLWP-B Telemetry Display: http://lilacsat.hit.edu.cn/dashboard/pages_en/telemetry-b.html
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m5aka
AMSAT-UK
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Chen Yue with 435/2250 MHz feed for the 12m dish at the DSLWP ground station – Image credit Wei Mingchuan BG2BHC
DSLWP Lunar Satellite
