Ham Radio Launches to Deep Space

ARTSAT2:DESPATCH was launched on a mission into deep space on 30 November 2014 carrying a 7 watt CW transmitter on 437.325 MHz

Ham Radio Launches to Deep Space

It will fly with the asteroid mission Hayabusa 2 and another amateur radio satellite Shin'en 2.

The satellite will have an elliptic orbit around the Sun and travel to a deep space orbit between Venus and Mars. Its inclination will be almost zero, which means Shin’en 2 will stay in the Earth’s equatorial plane. The distance from the Sun will be between 0.7 and 1.3 AU. An Astronomical Unit (AU) is 149,597,871 km.

The team have released the following information:

1. Despatch CW Format is now available!

Yesterday, we opened a wiki which explains how to join the "Cooperative data reconstruction," the main mission of Despatch.  In this wiki, you can find the CW format as well as how to report the data you received - http://despatch.artsat.jp/en/Cooperative_Data_Reconstruction

2. Despatch Tracking page is opened!

Since Despatch is injected into an Earth escape trajectory, TLE is unavailable. Instead, we opened a web-page for the spacecraft tracking (both antenna-pointing and receiver-tuning) - http://api.artsat.jp/pass/

By visiting the webpage and entering your geographic location, and you will get nearby passes and a table with 1 minute steps that gives you AZ, EL, Frequency, and so on. As the apparent movement and the change of the Doppler shift are slow, manual pointing of the antenna and tuning of the receiver every 10 minutes or so will do.

3. Reception Report page is opened!

We opened a web page in which you can report the data you received - http://api.artsat.jp/report/

ARTSAT2:DESPATCH Web - http://despatch.artsat.jp/en/Main_Page
ARTSAT2:DESPATCH Facebook https://www.facebook.com/artsat
ARTSAT2:DESPATCH Twitter https://twitter.com/DESPATCH_ARTSAT