Tuesday, November 18, 2014

One Year Tomorrow!

As of last night, we are still operating and I was able to get good, strong signal.  I had a little scare the other day but I found out my rotor/antenna array decided to randomly take off in the wrong direction instead of following computer control.  About a minute later, just as I was about to try to run them manually (which requires a third arm during a pass) the rotor motors snapped back into reality and tracked appropriately.  The quality part of a pass can be as short as a few minutes, so you really don't want to be waiting 2 minutes for your rotor/antennas to spin around.  Luckily they came into tracking right as the pass was coming to culmination.  I collected beacon data and several echoes. 

Tomorrow (2014-11-19) marks one year from launch and over 5000 orbits of the little cube.  Batteries still seem strong and orbit is high, so we'll see how long we can keep going!

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