INSPIRESat-1 Satellite

INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
INSPIRESat-1
Spacecraft INSPIRESat-1 (INternational Satellite Program In Research and Education Satellite, MinXSS-3)
Spacecraft type Nanosatellite
Units or mass 8.6 kg
Status Operational (SmallSat 2023 presentation)
Launched 2022-02-14
NORAD ID 51657
Deployer Unknown
Launcher PSLV (C52)
Organisation Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology
Institution University
Entity type Academic / Education
Nation India
Partners Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, National Central University and the National Space Organization in Taiwan, University of Versailles in France, University of Colorado Boulder
Oneliner

Ionospheric measurements, establish educational program and constellation of space weather satellites.

Description

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.

Results

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

Sources [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Photo sources [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
COTS subsystems
  • ADCS - Blue Canyon XACT
  • X-ray Spectrometer - Amptek X123 Silicon Drift Detector (SDD)
Subsystems sources [1]

Last modified: 2024-05-29

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Created by Erik Kulu

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

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