ARLA/CLUSTER: Satélite de amador XO-53 desonvolvido pela ESA lançado desde o centro da Russia

[João Costa > CT1FBF]

Ham radio geeks go mad in the arctic - tenth anniversary of XO-53 launch

The XO-53 (SSETI Express) satellite was launched October 27, 2005 at
06:52 UTC on board a Kosmos 3M rocket launched from the Plesetsk
Cosmodrome in central Russia.

SSETI Express was developed by the Education Office of the European
Space Agency (ESA) as part of the “Student Space Exploration and
Technology Initiative”. The satellite is quite large – 60x60x70 cm
with a mass of about 50 kg. It was built by university students from a
number of teams from all across Europe and assembled at the ESA ESTEC
facility in the Netherlands.

AMSAT-UK provided a 3 watt S band transmitter to the project – on the
basis that it could be linked to the UHF receiver for operation as a
single channel FM voice transponder when all the experiments have been
completed. The unit also incorporates its own switch mode power supply
and a 38k4 TNC to allow the rapid downlinking of data – especially
necessary for the camera experiment.

Shortly after launch SSETI deployed three CubeSats, XI-V, UWE-1 and
Ncube-2, developed by university students. After deploying the
CubeSats, XO-53’s batteries stopped charging and the spacecraft went
silent.

On the 10th Anniversary of the SSETI Express Launch a crack squad of
geeks, including Neil Melville-Kenney, Graham Shirville, Karl Kaas,
Sascha Tietz and Lars Mehnen, headed to the ESRANGE facility in
Northern Sweden to attempt to SEE the spacecraft for the first time in
a decade. They successfully captured images of the satellite as it
streaked across the dark Swedish sky.

See the pictures and download the AMSAT-UK SSETI Express Handbook from
http://amsat-uk.org/2015/10/27/tenth-anniversary-of-xo-53-launch/