INSPIRESat-1 Spacecraft

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.

First contact was established with the spacecraft 45 minutes after launch. The first science instruments were turned on by February 27th. DAXSS has now observed multiple solar flares in the current increasing phase of solar cycle 25 for a period of 16 months.

The IS-1 spacecraft completed its primary mission when it completed six months of science operations by August 30th, 2022 to achieve comprehensive success. The spacecraft has measured many solar flare events within 15 month on-orbit period and ionosphere plasma measurements during the brief eclipse period the spacecraft encountered between May-August, 2022.

The SD-cards are big enough that the first 15 months of observations are still on-board and available for downlink. The amount of the DAXSS science packets downlink has been limited so far because UHF communication has only been used for the prime mission, but more (even all) of the data is anticipated to be downlinked once reliable S-band radio is commissioned.

Spacecraft Anomalies

• In 15 months of operations, the spacecraft has encountered multiple ADCS resets assumed to be due to Single Event Upsets (SEU’s).
• The DAXSS instrument has shown two instances of anomalously high current draws which were isolated to the OBC of the instrument caused by SEU’s. Power cycling the instrument cleared these upsets. The spacecraft also experienced a hang up on the I2C line when the S-Band transmitter was switched on. Since primary science mission could be achieved by data downlink over UHF, it was decided to commission S-Band after the primary mission duration of 6 months. This has since been resolved by not beaconing on the UHF when S-band is in transmit mode. The UHF beaconing was causing noise in the I2C causing it to hang-up. However science data downlink over S-band has not been consistently done resulting large volume of science data still needing to be downloaded.
• Since October 2022, the spacecraft has had multiple issues with the on-board SD cards which include anomalous read pointer values for the science data partitions, Sd cards not being written to etc. Currently science data is being written to the 16 MB onboard flash memory and science data is downlinked daily before being over written. The SD Cards can still be read from and science data recorded previously is still being downlinked.

• ADCS - Blue Canyon XACT
• X-ray Spectrometer - Amptek X123 Silicon Drift Detector (SDD)