http://ssdl.stanford.edu/opal/Operations/opal/index.html

No more picos were fired tonight. Thelma and Louise, the remaining two picos, will be fired tomorrow AM. This evenings pass we spent downloading payload and spacecraft telemetry.

Looks like the pico firing last night saved Opal! A sharp drop in temperature occurred shortly after the firing of picos. This can be seen at data point 700 on the graph:

Temperature gif

An earlier event at data point 400 put Opal into a spin that faced our bottom, large solar panel directly at the sun. This resulted in the batteries being overcharged as well as contributed to battery heating. The pico launch perturbed our spin and saved us. You'll notice a spike around 900. Not sure what this is. This data was taken over 3 1/2 days time. See data sets for more accurate times. Let's hope we don't do this again.

We downloaded a current set of solar panel data. Check out:

Currents gif

You can also get attitude information from the temperature graph above too.

I'll give a Minotaur patch and Minotaur tatoo sticker to the first person who takes this data and animates a model of Opal (complete with solar panels and magnetometer...see Greg's mp3). I want to see Opal tumbling and the changes that we see in the temp data. Depending on how good it is, I might even throw in a free dinner.

We also have magnetometer data. Check out the plots from the data sets.

Space Command has confirmed pico launch and is tracking them. We hope to have 2 line elements soon. Unfortunatley, no one has heard from JAK and only a faint transmission for STENSAT. JAK's battery is assumed dead by now, and let's hope STENSAT comes around!

Tomorrow we'll take more payload data and fire T and L. Let's hope we have good contacts again.