TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
TJREVERB
Spacecraft name TJREVERB (TJ REVERB)
Spacecraft type CubeSat
Units or mass 2U
Status Reentry 2023-06-13. No signal? (There are SatNOGS reports with data, but no contacts achieved as per SmallSat 2023 presentation)
Launched 2022-11-26
NORAD ID 55128
Deployer NRCSD (NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer) [Quad-M]
Launcher Falcon 9 (CRS-26) (ELaNa 49)
Deployment Deployed from ISS on 2022-12-29
Organisation Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Institution School
Entity type Academic / Education
Country US
Oneliner

Educational training and amateur radio communications.

Description

Full duplex UHF/VHF uplink transceiver provided by AMSAT, and will assist students in learning the components of a working satellite, evaluating multiple communication methods, developing communication methodologies, and managing workflow.

TJHSST’s second satellite, the Thomas Jefferson Research and Education Vehicle for Radio Broadcasts (TJREVERB), is a 2U CubeSat that began as a student-initiated research project in 2016. Its goals are to test the performance of an Iridium 9602N Short Burst Data modem as a communications system for satellites with a SATT4 APRS backup radio, to produce documentation about how high school CubeSat organizations can best operate, and to educate the next generation of engineers and leaders in aerospace.

Components of TJREVERB are a mix of space-grade hardware, such as a Clyde Space Electrical Power System; Commercial Off-The-Shelf hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi Zero flight computer; and custom components, such as the flight computer’s interface board.

TJREVERB was designed to use the Iridium network as its primary mode of communication. For Iridium, the ground station is internet-based and exists solely in software: sending, receiving, and parsing emails to the Iridium service. Each email received from the Iridium service includes an attached message, along with details such as geolocation, time, transaction status, and size. TJREVERB’s Iridium ground station consisted of a backend script that parses received emails and stores data in an online Firebase database, and a frontend website that reads and updates from the database. Along with parsing and sending emails, the ground station handles encoding string commands to bytes and decoding incoming bytes to strings and numerical data.

Failure cause Fault in the team’s implementation of the Iridium radio, such as a broken solder joint, causing the radio to fail. Since we were not prepared for the implementation of Iridium to fail, we did not invest much time in developing an APRS ground station. APRS commands were sent but an issue with the naming convention was discovered. The original APRS Radio had been replaced since it was not functional and a replica board was swapped in. The team could not be certain that the proper call sign was assigned to the APRS radio. Therefore, the ham operators sent commands that may not have been properly defined.
Sources [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Photo sources [1] [2] [3]
COTS subsystems
  • EPS - Clyde Space
Subsystems sources [1]
Keywords Globalstar or Iridium or Inmarsat

Last modified: 2023-12-03

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Created by Erik Kulu

Email: erik.kulu@nanosats.eu
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/erikkulu

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