Artists impression of LightSail - Image Credit Planetary Society
The amateur radio spacecraft LightSail-1 is a 32 square metre solar sail demonstrator.
The first full scale deployment of the solar sail was conducted on March 4, 2011 at Stellar Exploration in San Luis Obispo, California. Read more
After launch LightSail-1 will spend a few weeks in orbit during which the team will check out the subsystems. The side panels will then be deployed, exposing a folded sail, and a motor driven sail deployment will extend rigid booms.
With the sail deployed, the primary operation for the spacecraft are performing 90 degree slews to get the sail normal to the sun vector, or edge on with the sun vector.
A combination of ground based sensors and on board sensors will be used to characterize the acceleration due to solar pressure. Imagers on the deployed panels are used to capture the sail deployment.
Proposing to have a downlink in the 435 MHz band with 1.5W output, semi-duplex 9k6 GMSK AX25 with a CW preamble to a single monopole. LightSail-1 is a 3U CubeSat weighing around 4.5 kg. More information will be available at http://polysat.calpoly.edu/LightSail.php
Watch LightSail-1 Video Update: Construction Begins!
The Planetary Society‘s LightSail program will launch three separate spacecraft over the course of several years, beginning with LightSail-1. Lightsail-2 will attempt a longer duration flight to higher Earth orbits, demonstrating that solar sails can increase their orbital energy and taking the next major step toward using solar sails for missions in and beyond Earth orbit.
LightSail-3 will fly to the Sun-Earth Libration Point, L1, where solar sail spacecraft could be permanently placed as solar weather stations, monitoring the geomagnetic storms from the Sun that potentially endanger electrical grids on Earth as well as satellites in Earth orbit.
The Cincinnati press reports that two Anderson Township amateur radio operators recently sent and received a photo from a satellite that was manually deployed from the International Space Station (ISS).
Farrell Winder W8ZCF and his son Jeff Winder KB8VCO achieved this despite the fact that an antenna on the satellite had snapped off prior to launch.
Students at Morehead State University are building an amateur radio CubeSat with a propulsion system that will raise the apogee of its orbit from 500 km to 1200 km.
RAMPART, which stands for RApidprototyped Mems Propulsion And Radiation Test CUBEflow SATellite, plans to launch on a Minotaur from Vandenburgh in June 2013.
It is a 2U CubeSat and will use a self-contained, warm gas, propulsion system to adjust satellite’s initial circular orbit of 500 km to an eliptical orbit with an apogee of 1200 km and perigee of 500 km at a 45 degree inclination.
RAMPART Thruster Design
It will demonstrate use of 3D printing (A.K.A. rapid prototyping) for manufacturing small satellites. Measure flux of energetic particles in lower Van Allen Belt. Test radiation-hardened electronic components and high performance solar cells in high radiation environment over a period of five years.
The students are proposing a UHF downlink of 9k6 GMSK AX25 packet. A downlink frequency of 437.325 MHz has been requested.
Mike Rupprecht DK3WN brings the sad news of the demise of the COMPASS-1 CubeSat that was launched April 28, 2008. COMPASS-1 was designed and built by students at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences in Germany.
Dear supporters and friends of our COMPASS-1 mission,
First, let me thank you very much for your support in trying to save the life of our COMPASS-1 satellite during the last days, but also during the last years of “routine” operations. It seems that our mission now comes to an end.
The projected lifetime of COMPASS-1 was half a year. The tiny guy has outperformed this value by a factor of more than seven. April 28th would have been it’s 4th birthday and if it was a human, it would now be about 500 years old (Cubesat-years are short). So, if you have more important things to do (and I guess so), we can not expect you to continue your efforts in saving its life.
With your support, you have made things possible that we would never have been able to achieve with our own resources and I appreciate your support very much. So, COMPASS-1, rest in peace. (Nevertheless, if you still want to try to awake it from the dead, feel free to do so.)
I hope that we will soon be able to build and launch COMPASS-2 and that you will be still available, all over the world, as a ground station to command and fly our new bird. We will keep you informed.
This video shows a presentation on the mur.sat TubeSat MURSAT1 that was given at the Chaos Computer Camp on August 13, 2011.
A team of about 15 people around mur.at (Graz/Austria) have build their first Nanosatellite called MURSAT1, based on the Interorbital Systems TubeSat and developed further following their research. In 2012 MURSAT1 should be launched into a 310 km orbit.
The amateur radio TubeSat carries a camera and a microphone. The command and control uplink is in the 145.9 MHz band and the downlink in the 435 MHz band. Further info at mur.sat wiki https://wiki.mur.at/sat/
Watch mur.sat – A (Hacker) Space Art Project – CCCamp 2011
This talk gives an overview of the project and the technical hacking done so far.
The team say Mursat1 itself will become our performer, taking self portraits with a camera, transmitting data about his position relative to earth by torquers, receiving and translating particle detection and collision with a piezo microphone, sending compressed audiodata for radio transmission on earth, hosting children’s wishes to become a shooting star themselves, counting.
Speaker: Bernhard Tittelbach, Christian Pointner
EventID: 4575
Event: Chaos Communication Camp 2011 (CCCamp 2011) of the Chaos Computer Club [CCC]
Location: Luftfahrtmuseum Finowfurt, Museumstr. 1, 16244 Schorfheide near Berlin, Germany
Language: English
Start: 13.08.2011 19:30:00 +02:00
Hector CO6CBF brings news of the formation of Grupo de Radioaficionados para Operaciones Satelitales (GROS). He writes:
AMSAT-UK 
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