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Opal Update -- February 03, 2000
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Ops Mode: Initial vehicle checkout. Opal looks good. In fact,
Opal looks very good. We all think it's working better in
space than it did here!
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Sorry for the delay in updates. The ops team here hasn't been
sleeping much and been working hard. It's amazing to think
Opal is up there and working! Good job everyone!
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Beacons are being heard world wide. HAMS in New Zealand,
France, Florida, D.C., Taiwan have all emailed in reports.
We'd like to setup a form on our web page for automated
beacon information to be entered. We haven't had the time
though.
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Contacts at SSDL have been limited at best. Opal is audible
but cannot here us. We are working the issue here as well
as looking at alternate stations. It seems Opal is very
sensitive to Doppler shift and we have to be right on with
our frequency settings.
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We attempted to fire picosats earlier in the week with the
auxiliary receiver. None were fired. We do not know why.
We'll find out more as we gain reliable communication.
Our next attempt to fire Aerospace picosatellites will be
Sunday Feb 6. We are not confident the auxiliary receiver
worked because we did not get a confirmed CPU reset via
the aux receiver when we attempted them.
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We moved radio equipment up to SRI's 150 radio dish behind
Stanford to attempt to talk to Opal. Last night and
this morning, we connected to Opal for three excellent contacts.
We downloaded approximately 96 Kbytes of data. Log files and
telemetry are found at:
http://ssdl.stanford.edu/opal/operations/data/
Check out the plots. Greg did a great job automating our
data plotting routines. The time scales may be off on the
plots. Check out the data for each plot to see the actual
times. If you see data zeored out...that usually means we
lost contact in the middle of the download. Twelve minute
passes go fast.
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The big dish is in use now by NASA to look for the Mars
probe. We'll get the dish back on Sunday night. In the
meanwhile, the ops team is going to rest abit and work
on accessing a nearby station, either Lars' or the
Stanford HAM club's station. Hopefully, theirs will
perform better than ours.
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We are still working the issue of our ground station.
Our radio is not up to par. During our first pass at
the dish yesterday evening, no data was collected because
of it. Lars performed a two inch percussion adjustment
and it worked fine after that. Yes, that means we picked
it up and dropped it. Jarred it back into working. The
rest of the passes worked well after that.
If anyone (or their companines) is interested in funding
new equipment (especially a radio), please let us know!
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Our next scheduled attempt to fire picos is Sunday evening.
We'll work with Aerospace to fire them. Not longer after
that, we plan on kicking out the rest, especially STENSAT.
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Please look over the data and if you see anything interesting,
let us know. We'd like to get a tumble rate from the solar
panel data but may not get to it for awhile. On our next
contact, we'll get more panel data.
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I think that's about it...I'll send out anything I missed!
Thanks for all the encouragement. The Opal ops team is glad
to know you're cheering for us all! And, wow, Opal looks
good up there.
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