[amsat-bb] Amateur Deep Space Tracking

[Nico Janssen]

All,

Many radio amateurs are familiar with tracking amateur satellites
that orbit the Earth in low orbits or high elliptical orbits.
Several tracking programs and all required orbital parameters are
available for tracking these satellites.

But soon spacecraft carrying an amateur radio payload will be
launched towards the Moon and beyond. If amateurs want to track
these spacecraft they will need suitable tracking software and
orbital elements to be able to calculate the positions of these
spacecraft.

Calculations

Unfortunately none of the currently available tracking programs,
used for satellite tracking by amateurs, is suitable for deep
space tracking. But fortunately two free, open source software
packages for Windows, Linux and Mac are available, that will
enable deep space tracking:

General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT)
http://gmatcentral.org/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/files/GMAT/GMAT-R2017a/

SciLab, including CelestLab, CelestLabX and Aerospace Blockset
http://www.scilab.org/
http://atoms.scilab.org/toolboxes/celestlab
https://atoms.scilab.org/toolboxes/aerospace_blockset

Probably most amateurs will prefer GMAT, because it is most user
friendly, has a lot of documentation and help files, and contains
many sample scripts. Scripts that are created by other amateurs
can be used without having much knowledge or experience with
GMAT.

Measurements

It is not certain that orbital elements for all deep space spacecraft
carrying amateur radio payloads will be made available to
radio amateurs. Therefore amateurs may need to measure these
orbital elements themselves through doppler and ranging
measurements. So amateurs will need to set up their own Amateur
Deep Space Network, similar to NASA's DSN, ESA's Estrack, etc.
This will require some stations with large enough antennas and
with equipment to carry out doppler and ranging measurements
to determine direction and distance to the spacecraft. This new
development is an interesting challenge for radio amateurs.

For further details see my Amateur Deep Space Tracking page:
https://hamsat1.home.xs4all.nl/index.html

You can find further information on space flight on this very
informative set of pages:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/basics/
Deep space navigation is covered in chapter 13:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/basics/chapter13-1/

73,
Nico PA0DLO