{"id":235719,"date":"2015-10-27T18:44:37","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T22:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amsat-uk.org\/?p=27097"},"modified":"2015-10-27T18:44:37","modified_gmt":"2015-10-27T22:44:37","slug":"tenth-anniversary-of-xo-53-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=235719","title":{"rendered":"Tenth Anniversary of XO-53 Launch"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"SSETI<\/a><\/p>\n

SSETI Express XO-53 streaks across the dark Swedish sky on October 27, 2015.
Two images combined, and zoomed. As you can see, they caught a flare.
The gap in the middle is when the mirror of the camera was moving in between shots.
The two stars marked are the upper two of The Plough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The XO-53 (SSETI Express<\/a>) satellite was launched October 27, 2005 at 06:52 UT on board a Kosmos 3M rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in central Russia.<\/p>\n

\"SSETI<\/a><\/p>\n

SSETI Express XO-53<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

SSETI Express was developed by the Education Office of the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the \u201cStudent Space Exploration and Technology Initiative\u201d. The satellite measures 60x60x70 cm with a mass of about 50 kg. It was built by university students from a number of teams from all across Europe and assembled at the ESA ESTEC facility in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

AMSAT-UK provided a 3 watt S band transmitter to the project – on the basis that it could be linked to the UHF receiver for operation as a single channel FM voice transponder when all the experiments have been completed. The unit also incorporates its own switch mode power supply and a 38k4 TNC to allow the rapid downlinking of data \u2013 especially necessary for the camera experiment.<\/p>\n

Shortly after launch SSETI deployed three CubeSats,\u00a0XI-V, UWE-1 and Ncube-2, developed by university students. After deploying the CubeSats, XO-53’s batteries stopped charging and the spacecraft went silent.<\/p>\n

\"ESRANGE<\/a><\/p>\n

ESRANGE in Arctic Sweden<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On the 10th Anniversary of the SSETI Express Launch a crack squad of geeks, Neil Melville-Kenney PA9N<\/a><\/strong>, Graham Shirville G3VZV<\/a><\/strong>, Karl Kaas OZ2KK<\/a><\/strong>, Sascha Tietz KJ6LIL<\/a><\/strong> and Lars Mehnen OE3HWM<\/a><\/strong>, headed to the ESRANGE facility in Northern Sweden to attempt to SEE the spacecraft for the first time in a decade.<\/p>\n

They successfully captured images of the satellite as it streaked across the dark Swedish sky.<\/p>\n

Read the AMSAT-UK SSETI Express Handbook<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the Story of the birth of the On Board Computer for SSETI Express<\/a><\/strong> by Karl Kaas<\/p>\n

AMSAT-UK has been given exclusive access to the report on the hunt for SSETI Express. Read the SSETI Express Phase E \u2013 400-800 THz Downlink Report<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Further pictures are available on the Facebook page of Neil Melville-Kenney PA9N<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Explanation<\/a><\/p>\n

Explanation of SSETI Express observed flare in terms of the two images captured Oct. 27, 2015
Note team couldn’t use mirror lock-up in combination with the specific remote, hence wobble<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The XO-53 (SSETI Express) satellite was launched October 27, 2005 at 06:52 UT on board a Kosmos 3M rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in central Russia. SSETI Express was developed by the Education Office of the European Space Agency … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-AMSAT"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=235719"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235807,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235719\/revisions\/235807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=235719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=235719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=235719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}