Union Aerospace

Archive for the ‘Milestones’ Category

Here is a running ADS-B test on the engineering model inner structure of the satellite.
The signal reception is great, getting more than 44dB above the noisefloor (upper graph, 19.9mV/dB), a rare situation though, because it´s not much nearby traffic here.
Lower graph shows a weak signal, barely above noise at -92dBm. The bits still look decodable – I´ll continue optimizing. It´s a bit of a challenge.
In average, there are many many signals per second with 10-20dB over noisefloor with no visible planes.

The test of our new solar panels was successful. The power output is 6 times the value given in the datasheet.

Milling the Shakerbox. Thanx to Jacek Wisniowski for technical support.

A development model of WREN in the shakerbox frame

This is the first picture transmitted from the satellite in Martin-1 SSTV format. Thanx for this lovely support to my sweetheart Rong

Find out more about SSTV

Succesful test of my 8-Channel pulsed plasma thruster. Let´s see how it performs in orbit.

Paul Kocyla at the vacuum test chamber of the FH-Aachen University

Rotation rate estimation for our RCS+IMU (reaction control system/inertial measuring unit)
The module includes a 3-axes rate gyro, 3-axes accelerometer and control hardware for microthrusters.
It will work together with the optical navigation module, reaction wheels and thrusters beeing able to determine its attitude and position in space, tracing its flight path and perform desaturation and midcourse corrections.
Fixed point arithmetic on quaternions and kalman filters will be used for fast and accurate calculations. (Paul Kocyla Sep2011)