UWE-3 Six month in Space

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This week we’re celebrating UWE-3 “Six months in Space” with a highlight created out of the on-board ADCS data recorded.

Attitude Determination during pass over Wuerzburg

Already in January the satellite obtained a precise attitude determination after in-orbit calibration of the magnetometers. With this, we have now compiled a graphical demonstration of its movement during a pass over Wuerzburg. The video shows the satellite’s rotation in 8x time lapse, based on an attitude determination recording during which every 2 seconds the current estimated quaternions have been sampled. The satellite’s rotation is mainly about the Body Z axis, which is the axis in which the antennas are deployed and in which the main magnetic dipole is located. Visible is also minor jitter due to sensor noise inherent to the attitude determination process.

UWE-3_AD

To watch to video please visit our News-Page: Attitude determination

Great Radio Amateur support

Since the very first operation of UWE-3 we received outstanding support from the radio amateurs around the world. PE0SAT received the first Beacon over Europe at 21.11.2013 / 9:19 UTC followed by DK3WN at 11:26 UTC. Here a complete list of “followers” of UWE-3 including the date and UTC of the first received beacon.

UWE-3_HamSupport

 

Since 21 November 2013 we received already more then 7.000 beacon. This diagram shows the number of packets received by the individual HAM:

UWE-3_HamReception

Plotted over a world map you see the location of UWE-3 generated out of the received beacons (without beacons from the ground station of Wuerzburg):

UWE-3_HamWorld

In our last News we informed you about the new UWE-3 Online Telemetry Decoder from DK3WN (Thank you Mike!). The transmission to our server is much easier now because the valuable beacons from you are directly “injected” into our database. The following plot shows the great success of the new online decoder including the test phase beginning in the middle of April. All previous data has been submitted by e-mail or ftp-upload:

UWE-3_HamUpload

GREAT THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Yours sincerely, UWE-3 Team

UWE-3 Batch

Thanks UWE-3 Team for keeping me/us informed and I am proud to be part of this experiment and group of enthusiasts. Lets hope that there will be a lot more opportunities to listen for that small cubesat.