IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination
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IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination |
| KickSat-2 | Updated: 09 Nov 2015 | Responsible Operator | Zac Manchester | |
| Supporting Organisation | Cornell University | |||
| Contact Person | zrm3@cornell.edu.nospam | |||
| Headline Details: KickSat is a CubeSat technology demonstration mission designed to demonstrate the deployment and operation of prototype Sprite “ChipSats” (femtosatellites) developed at Cornell University. ChipSats like the Sprite represent a disruptive new space technology that will both open space access to hobbyists and students and enable new types of science missions. A significant portion of the KickSat mission has been financed by over 300 individual sponsors through the crowd-source funding website Kickstarter. The Sprite is a tiny spacecraft that includes power, sensor, and communication systems on a printed circuit board measuring 3.5 by 3.5 cm with a thickness of 2.5 mm and a mass of about 5 grams. It is intended as a general-purpose sensor platform for micro-electro-mechanical (MEMS) or other chip-scale sensors with the ability to downlink data to ground stations from LEO. KickSat is a 3U CubeSat being built to carry and deploy 100 Sprites. A 1U avionics bus will provide power, communications, and command and data handling functions. A 2U deployer has been developed to house the Sprites. 100 will be stacked atop a spring-loaded pusher and secured by a nichrome burn wire system. After being released from the P-POD, KickSat will deploy a dipole antenna and establish communication with Cornell’s ground station. After check-out, the on board GPS receiver will be used to perform orbit determination. A command from the ground station will trigger the deployment of the Sprites once an altitude of 325km has been reached. After deployment, telemetry and sensor measurements from the individual Sprites will be received through Cornell’s ground station in Ithaca, NY, as well as several other amateur ground stations throughout the world. The Sprites are expected to reenter the atmosphere and burn up within a few days. Their worst-case maximum orbital lifetime is estimated at 2 weeks. The KickSat bus will be used for additional GPS and communication experiments after the Sprite deployment as part of an extended mission. Proposed KickSat Downlink Frequency 435-438 MHz band. 1 watt 10K0F1D: Proposed Sprite downlink AX.25 over FSK.Frequency Band: 435-438 MHz. Output Power: 10 mW ITU Emission Designator: 50K0G1D. Description: MSK modulated binary data with each data bit modulated as a 511 bit PRN sequence. All Sprites operate on a single frequency and use CDMA. Planning a NanoRacks deployment from the ISS on the CRS-6 (OA6) mission. ** Downlink frequencies of 437,240 MHz for the KickSat bus downlink and 437,505 MHz for the Sprite Downlinks have been coordinated** | ||||
| Application Date: | 01 Sep 2015 | Freq coordination completed on | 06 Nov 2015 | |
The IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination Status pages are hosted
by AMSAT-UK as a service to the world wide Amateur Satellite Community
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