INSPIRESat-1 (INternational Satellite Program In Research and Education Satellite, MinXSS-3)

Ionospheric measurements, establish educational program and constellation of space weather satellites.

Educational satellite dedicated to measuring the structure and variability of ionospheric plasma and plasma irregularities. The payload is the Compact Ionospheric Probe (CIP), an all in one plasma sensor, as well as a UHF transceiver operating at a fixed frequency of 437.5 MHz that is used for telemetry, beaconing and telecommand.

INSPIRESAT-1 will routinely beacon housekeeping and telemetry data, while the science payload data from CIP will be downlinked over the ground station in IIST, India. As a university CubeSat mission, INSPIRESAT-1 involves extensive student participation in design, testing, and operations.

The core team involves 20+ students and faculty at IIST (India), University of Colorado Boulder, and NCU(Taiwan).Unlike conventional satellite tracking and telemetry reception using stand-alone mission specific custom software/executable (which has virtually no value addition to amateur operators) we are planning to release a versatile software defined radio based modular signal processing scripts implemented in open source GNU radio package. This will tremendously benefit amateur radio operators in terms of system level understanding of real-time packet telemetry demodulation and decoding. To this effect, we shall release end-to-end documentation for installation and configuration of telemetry decoders. The packet definitions and telemetry decoding information will be publicly available as well. 

Ionospheric measurements, which will advance our understanding of ionosphere dynamics and plasma transport. Establish a long-term academic program for developing a constellation of small satellites and a global network of ground stations. INSPIRE aims to provide a university constellation of Earth & space weather observing satellites.