Amateur Radio Information Bulletin

Recently we have also been publishing all images taken by OPS-SAT in-orbit on Flickr!
You can find the album at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/esa_events/albums/72157716491073681

In other news, in September we also presented at the GNU Radio GRCon20 online conference.
You can find the paper here: https://pubs.gnuradio.org/index.php/grcon/article/view/65
And the Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qByw7sJz720

We received a lot of positive and constructive commends and this is also in part thanks to the Radio Amateur community!

Stay tuned and stay safe!

Kind regards,
OPS-SAT Flight Control Team

The first images taken by the High-Definition camera on OPS-SAT have officially been published and can be found at:
http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/08/OPS-SAT_captures_our_home_in_space
http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/08/Space_laboratory_sees_snowy_Svalbard
http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/08/First_OPS-SAT_photos_capture_frosty_fjord
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/08/OPS-SAT_over_October_Revolution_Island

Still in commissioning, OPS-SAT will soon be crossing into the experimental phase of the mission where innovative hardware and software experiments will be executed.

Good news for Windows users! DK3WN has developed a beacon decoder for OPS-SAT that can be used in conjunction with the popular UZ7HO soundmodem.
Demodulated FM audio from any SDR receiver software is piped to UZ7HO and a TCP/IP KISS interface to the DK3WN Beacon decoder allows for the parsing of the OPS-SAT beacon frames.

DK3WN has also experimented with feeding 48kHz sampled FM demodulated audio to the gr-opssat GnuRadio application and presents the results.

More information at: http://dk3wn.info/blog/satelliten/ops-sat/

UZ7HO Soundmodem decoding OPS-SAT:

DK3WN Beacon Decoder:

(images by DK3WN)

The OPS-SAT Flight Control Team is currently in the process of uploading an update to the on-board software.
This was done in reaction to the discovery of a safety bug in the operation of the S-band transmitter.
The update will ensure safe operations of the transmitter during S-band passes with ESOC.

All power and attitude parameters of the spacecraft are nominal.
No payloads have been turned on yet, once the S-band link is brought into safe service after the update, payload
commissioning will start which is on schedule and planned for late January/early February.

Kind regards,
OPS-SAT FCT

The ESOC Flight Control Team wants to say a massive thank you to the Radio Amateur community!
The observations sent to us have been extremely useful in the early operations so far.

Due to limited Telemetry, all beacon observations are still more than welcome and are very useful to us.
We will continue to provide updates as operations progress.

Various sources and doppler observations indicate that object with NORAD ID 44878 (2019-092F) is OPS-SAT.
The updated tle can be found at: https://opssat1.esoc.esa.int/tle.txt

A new TLE was handed over to us by the ESOC Flight Dynamics taking into account the 24 hour shift: https://opssat1.esoc.esa.int/tle.txt

A final TLE will be provided by Arianespace after separation of the spacecraft.

A new launch date has been communicated by Arianespace, 18th of December at 08:54:20 UTC.

Press release attached.

We have received a message that the launch has been delayed for at least 24hrs due to a software issue on the launcher.

Tweet from Stéphane Israël:
https://twitter.com/arianespaceceo/status/1206854182570885121

Arianespace press release attached.

Finally the launch is close, the Flight Control Team at ESOC is fully ready and we are excited to finally see that OPS-SAT will reach orbit.
There will be live launch coverage on Tuesday 17th of December on ESA WebTV starting at 8:20 UTC (https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/ESA_Web_TV ).

Full programme details are available at:
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Transmissions/2019/12/CHEOPS_OPS-SAT_Soyuz_VS23_launch_from_Kourou

The Arianespace launch kit covering all technical details of the launch is available at:
https://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-vs23/

Exciting times lie ahead!

A new TLE was provided by Arianespace and processed by ESOC's Flight Dynamics department and is available at: https://opssat1.esoc.esa.int/tle.txt