ARLA/CLUSTER: FUNcube-1 celebra o seu 4 Aniversário em orbita

[João Costa > CT1FBF]

FUNcube-1 celebrates its 4th birthday

On Tuesday, November 21, the amateur radio satellite *FUNcube-1*
(AO-73) completed 4 years in orbit

FUNcube-1 was launched at 0710 UT on November 21, 2013 and its first
signals were received immediately after deployment over the Indian Ocean by
amateurs in South Africa. Since then it has been operating continuously in
either its education mode or, with the transponder active, in amateur mode
when in eclipse and at weekends.
Final gluing of FUNcube-1 bolt by Wouter Weggelaar PA3WEG

The spacecraft has spent the four years in space orbiting the earth at
between 640 and 580 km and has now traveled around the earth more than
20,000 times. That represents a distance traveled of approaching 500
million miles.

Up to now, each of the orbits has been spilt approximately 65% in sunlight
and 35% in eclipse. This has resulted in the temperatures inside the small
spacecraft varying by about 25° C during each orbit.

During the recent AMSAT-UK Colloquium, *Wouter Weggelaar, PA3WEG*, in his
presentation about the FUNcube project mentioned that the power available
from the solar panels has been slowly increasing since launch. This
observation led the team to do some further investigations as to the cause.

Although the launch was into a nominally Sun Synchronous orbit, over time
this has drifted and the spacecraft is now entering a period when it will
be in the sun for longer periods during each orbit. The exact details are
still being determined, but it seems likely that, starting from January
2018, there will be periods when the spacecraft will be in the sun for all,
or almost all, of its orbits.

This means that the on-board temperatures will be much higher than we have
previously experienced in flight, although we have some test records from
pre-flight thermal air testing that were undertaken after integration.

The key will be to discover what the equilibrium temperature will be
internally. For comparison, AO85 has already “enjoyed� periods of full sun
and its internal temperatures have reached up to around 55° C.

So the next few months will be quite an exciting time for the team!
We remain extremely grateful to everyone using the spacecraft for both its
educational and amateur missions. Of course we are also very very grateful
to those who are downloading the telemetry and uploading the data to the
Data Warehouse. It continues to provide a unique record of “life on board�
a 1U CubeSat in space.

You can watch the presentation given by Wouter PA3WEG on the FUNcube
project at https://youtube.com/AmsatUK

AMSAT-UK http://amsat-uk.org/
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