IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination

 
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Picasso Updated: 11 May 2015   Responsible Operator Stefan Dombrowski ON6TI
Supporting Organisation QB50 & Belgium Institut for Space Aeronomy  
Contact Person on6ti@uba.be.nospam  
Headline Details: PICASSO is a joint project led by the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy -BISA in collaboration with the Royal Observatory of Belgium -ROB. It is supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office -BELSPO in the frame of the QB50 initiative proposed by the von Karman Institute -VKI. PICASSO objective is to build and to operate a scientific 3U CubeSat in order to demonstrate that small and low-cost satellites are valuable for the atmospheric and space sciences. To wider the relevance of the demonstration, PICASSO will embark a payload (P/L) composed of three independent scientific instruments 1. VISION, a visible and near-infrared hyper-spectral imager 2. SLP, a sweeping-potential multi-needle Langmuir probe 3. uBOS, a micro-bolometer oscillation system. The first two instruments and the spacecraft bus are under the responsibility of BISA- the third instrument is managed by ROB. VISION is a hyper-spectral imager in the visible and the near-infrared domain, between 400 and 800 nm. By measuring the light absorption in the Chappuis band, vertical profiles of ozone concentrations will be retrieved. Its second target is to assess the refracted Sun shape in order to retrieve stratospheric and mesospheric temperature profiles by inverting the ray-tracing problem. Full spectral scan observations of nightglows and polar auroras are also foreseen if the dynamic range of the instrument allows it. SLP The second instrument is the sweeping-potential multi-needle Langmuir Probe system. The system is made of four needle probes set to different sweeping electric potentials with regard to the S/C. By sampling the electric current collected by each probe, the plasma electron density, its temperature and the spacecraft potential can be retrieved. At 500 km height, a time resolution of 10 kHz corresponds to a spatial resolution of the order of one metre, which is a large improvement over the kilometre resolution currently reachable with ground-based measurements. uBOS The high resolution micro Bolometric Oscillation Sensor is designed to carry out thermal flux measurements constrained by the variations in the Earth Radiation Budget. It is an adaptation of the BOS sensor flying aboard PICARD and monitoring the energy emitted by the Sun and the Earth at different wavelengths. Proposing to use a GMSK 9k6 downlink on UHF and an QPSK 1Mbps downlink on 2.4GHz. **** This project has been cancelled**
Application Date: 12 Jun 2014   Freq coordination completed on

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