[amsat-bb] ESEO has now started its commissioning

[Graham Shirville]

On Monday December 3rd 2018, the 50kg ESA Education Office satellite 
ESEO was launched by Space-X on the Spaceflight SSO-A SmallSat Express 
mission.

Following the launch from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg 
Air Force Base, ESEO separated from the launch vehicle and automatically 
activated the periodic transmission of its telemetry beacon. However, by 
the time out of a predefined period, having not received commands from 
the ground station, the spacecraft automatically entered into safe mode.

Some initial communications issues were experienced by ESEO in receiving 
commands from the ground stations in Forli’ (Italy) and Vigo (Spain), 
but they were resolved when the ESEO team of the Observatory of Tartu 
offered the possibility to use a ground station in Estonia. This is 
capable of transmitting with higher power, for a temporary contingent 
use. The Estonian ground station has been configured to be operated 
remotely by the ESEO MCC team, which involves students of the University 
of Bologna.

ESEO then started executing the commands transmitted from ground.

ESEO has now completed the LEOPS  (Launch and Early OPerationS) phase of 
its mission, reaching the platform nominal mode and has begun the 
process of commissioning the whole satellite: firstly the platform 
functions, with the payloads functions following.

As part of this commissioning process, but subject to the successful 
completion of other preparatory tasks of the platform subsystems 
commissioning, it is anticipated that initial testing of the AMSAT 
communications payload will be carried out within the next few weeks.

AMSAT-UK will endeavour to provide some advance notice of these tests 
being undertaken, but the first step will be activation of the 1200bps 
BPSK telemetry beacon on 145.895MHz. The telemetry format matches 
previous FUNcube missions and data from this beacon will be forwarded to 
the FUNcube Data Warehouse using any of the FUNcube dashboards. However, 
to see the decoded values and graphical displays, please download the 
dedicated ESEO mission dashboard which is available here 
https://download.funcube.org.uk/ESEO_Dashboard_v1177.msi

The payload has, additionally, a high speed, 4800bps BPSK data format 
downlink and also a Mode L/V FM transponder both of which will be tested.

Further information about ESEO can be seen here: 
https://www.esa.int/Education/ESEO/ESEO_student_satellite_in-orbit_commissioning_has_started

73

Graham G3VZV