[GCARC] Lightsail 2 telemetry copied at the W2MMD clubhouse satellite station

[Jonathan Pearce]

You may have heard of the Lightsail<https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/05/lightsail-2-sends-its-first-signals-back-to-earth/>  2 solar wind satellite that was recently launched, and might also have seen that its first telemetry was received this week. That telemetry was also received by the W2MMD satellite station under control of the SatNOGS<http://w2mmdsatellite.blogspot.com/2018/08/satnogs-satellite-reporting-network.html> project. The pass was programmed by Fredy Damikalis, one of the SatNOGS staff team, and the output can be seen here.<https://network.satnogs.org/observations/789445/> SatNOGS was also able to decode the 9600 baud telemetry that can be seen on the Data tab of that page. Lightsail 2 is in a low-inclination orbit so its elevation over our location is always pretty low (this pass had a max elevation of 14 degrees) so having the ideal location of the clubhouse along with the directional antennas probably provided one of the best opportunities to copy the telemetry, at least from this latitude. Additional passes are programmed into SatNOGS and we’ll manually listening to some of them.  We’ll also be watching for several other new satellites that were launched recently or scheduled to be launched today.

73 de Jon WB2MNF