AMSATSA Transponder to Fly on BACAR

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The AMSATSA Kletskous transponder will be flown on the next BACAR flight, which is scheduled for 21 October 2017 to coincide with the JOTA and CQ Hou Koers weekend.

The transponder was recently successfully demonstrated at the AMSAT South Africa and SARL SDR workshop.

The transponder is linear with an uplink on 70 cm and a downlink on 2 metres. More details, frequencies and other payloads on BACAR 2017 will be announced soon.

Kletskous Transponder Demonstration - http://www.amsatsa.org.za

Falconsat-3 Available for Amateur Radio

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The US Air Force Academy satellite Falconsat-3 is now open for amateur radio use as a digital store-and-forward system

FalconSAT-3 was built throughout 2005 and 2006 by cadets and faculty in the Space Systems Research Center at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO, and launched in 2007 on an Atlas V.

After serving in scientific and training roles, the Academy has now made the satellite available for Amateur radio use.

The satellite is in a 35.4 degree inclination orbit, with an approximate altitude of 465 to 476 km. The Packet Bulletin Board System is operating at 9600 baud with a 145.840 uplink, and 435.103 downlink. Output power is 1 watt, and the downlink is continuously on. Digipeating is enabled for live QSOs, but unattended digipeating operations is not authorized at this time. Current Keplerian elements can be found in the AMSAT distributed Keplerian elements.

More information - https://www.amsat.org/falconsat-3/

Three ELaNa CubeSats Delivered to ISS

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Delivery of recent payloads to the ISS including three CubeSats which are part of NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) mission

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft successfully berthed to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday 16 August 2017 after their twelfth commercial resupply (CRS) mission launched from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The CRS-12 Dragon carried 32 of NanoRacks’ customer payloads to the ISS.

Notably on this mission was the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) and Adcole-Maryland Aerospace’s Kestrel Eye IIM (KE2M) satellite. This satellite is a technology demonstration seeking to validate the concept of using microsatellites in low-Earth orbit to support critical operations. The overall goal is to demonstrate that small satellites are viable platforms for proving critical path support to operations and hosting advanced payloads.

KE2M is the second flagship satellite in NanoRacks’ Kaber Deployment Program. NanoRacks Kaber Deployment Program allows for a larger EXPRESS class of satellites to be deployed from the International Space Station, up to 100 kilograms. NanoRacks deploys these Kaber-class satellites currently through the Japanese Experiment Module Airlock and will shift deployments to the NanoRacks Airlock Module when the Company’s commercial Airlock becomes operational (planned for 2019).

On this mission are also three satellites that were selected for flight by NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) as part of the twenty-second installment of the Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) missions, and sponsored by the NASA Launch Services Program (LSP). These include NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s (JPL) ASTERIA, Goddard Spaceflight Center’s DELLINGR, and Pennsylvania State University’s OSIRIS-3U. These CubeSats have a target deployment for mid-November.

Additionally, NanoRacks brought 28 DreamUp student experiments to the ISS, which includes the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program Mission 11 (21 MixStix), Israel’s Ramon Foundation (5 MixStix), Cuberider-1, and the Boy Scouts of America (both NanoLab projects).

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) project, sponsored by the Center for Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), is the first-ever experiment in space by BSA. The scouts of Troop 209, a part of the Pathway to Adventure Council based in Chicago, are seeking to better understand how bacteria function in space, and why virulence patterns in space differ from those on Earth.

With the completion of the CRS-12 launch, NanoRacks has now brought over 580 payloads to the International Space Station since 2009.