STARS-Me2 Spacecraft

Educational mission with camera and amateur radio activities.

STARS-Me2 is the successor to STARS-Me, which is an improved version of STARS-Me's ultra-compact mobile robot (climber) and will be tested on a single CubeSat. The mission is to extend the tape tether from the 1U CubeSat (10cm cubic microsatellite) unit, and the microrobot moves on the tether.

The tether length is about 3.5 m, and the mobile robot is one size smaller than the CubeSat. We will learn the basic technology as a small-scale experiment of a space elevator and apply it to space debris countermeasures.

Pictures taken by the camera mounted on the satellite are transmitted to the earth using AX.25 packet communication. Those pictures are: the earth taken from the space and the deployed robot taken from the main body of satellite.

1. The packet reception success rate at receiving ground stations is measured. The success rate is measured for every baud rate of 1.2kbps, 9.6kbps and 115.2kbps.
2. The coding gain of the error correction scheme is measured on downlink.
3. The reception performance with polarization diversity at multiple terrestrial receiver stations (developed by amateur radio operators) is evaluated. For the evaluation ground stations capable of receiving vertical and horizontal linear polarization waves, and circular polarization wave are prepared. (Evaluated by the number of successful received packets.)
4. A large data such as images is transmitted to the ground stations.