Pictures from 2015-06-15

I have retrieved and processed the best pictures from the "June 15" roll.  I've had to remember the procedures and work arounds we developed to get everything to work.  Luckily I documented it step-by-step and while I remember thinking "of course I don't need to write this down, I won't forget".  Well, let me tell you, I would have forgot.  I am really lucky that I didn't change the toolchain computer and my workflow was well documented.

One of the pictures seems to be a coastline, but the clouds make it difficult to identify.  I think it is (based on time when shot) near India or Australia.

The satellite is still as finicky as ever, I think it laughs at me when I issue several commands, pretending it didn't hear me, when I know the link budget and there is plenty of clear signal up there.  It has had a personality since day 1, so I know it knows what it is doing.   

And We're Still Going

The satellite continues to operate now, almost 19 months mission time.  We are collecting at least 2 notable pictures and hope to have them complete in the next week or so.  Orbit has noticeably dropped but we continue to contact the satellite at least once a week (typically 2 or 3 times) and get useful information.  My guess is about 3 - 9 months left before re-entry, but I am not the expert.

Stay tuned for an update.

Good News, 200 Million Miles Traveled

At 1:48am EDT, today, our Vermont Lunar CubeSat has passed two hundred million miles of travel since its launch on November, 19, 2013, and it is still operating.  Over 7200 orbits of our Big Blue Marble.

A year since our first picture

It has been almost a year since we successfully downloaded our first picture we called "The Good Earth".  We have been running for 15 months.  Today I successfully downloaded and echo and heard 3, which is pretty good since the pass was only 27 degrees and my rotor can't currently track azimuth for some reason.
We are past our mission life goal, and continuing to operate and even collecting science data.
I need to consolidate and organize mission data, but I continue to have good passes and keeping notes on what to do on our next satellite build.  Feel free to let me know what you think an any ideas you might have of things we can do better at. 

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!