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Opal Update -- February 07, 2000
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Well, these past few days of Opals ops have been frustrating. Since
Thursday, Opal's beacon has been undecodable. Opals tranmission
system is failing. It's either the TNC or the radio. However it
does appear to be receiving OK. Instead of the expected 9600 baud
signal, we are receiving a single tone at the beacon intervals.
We've been working on a backup plan to launch picos and it seems
somewhat successful. It works well on our engineering model of Opal
and we're still testing on the orbiting Opal.
Surprisingly, we were able to connect this morning during our ops
session at the big dish. We were able to send a fire command for the
Aerospace picos but did not get confirmation. We lost our signal
before it was downloaded. Aerospace appeared to hear their beacon
but it now appears to be local noise. SSN is monitoring Opal and
looking for other objects near Opal. Their radar will be able to
see the picos.
In a few minutes here we have another pass. We'll be loggin in and
looking for launcher data. We'll also trying relaunching Aerospace
picos. They have asked to delay launching the other picos until
they get a confirmed monitoring by SSN.
Stay tuned.
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For latest Opal spacecraft data:
http://ssdl.stanford.edu/opal/operations/data/
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