[amsat-bb] FASTRAC Separation!

[Sebastian Muñoz]

All,

First of all I wanted to thank the HAM community all over the world for
supporting our project, your support has been incredible and we really
value.  Today, after a few months of initial operations, we started one of
the most exciting phases of our project by separating both of our girls so
that they can compute on-orbit real-time relative navigation solutions while
both of them are freely drifting from one another.  We sent the command to
separate them at 16:56:11 CDT and over the next few passes we will be
checking to confirm their separation.   We will continue to update the
satellites' TLEs on our website (
http://fastrac.ae.utexas.edu/for_radio_operators/users/phpBB3/predictedorbit.php)
if any of you are interested in tracking them.  We really appreciate all of
your help so far and we hope that we can continue to count on it.

Thanks again, 73,

Sebastian Munoz (KE5FKV)
FASTRAC Student Program Manager

-- 
Sebastian Muñoz Toro
Graduate Research Assistant
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Satellite Design Laboratory
email: sebastian_munoz at mail.utexas.edu
phone:  +1 (512) 471-5144
cell:  +1 (512) 825-3857