via Amateur Radio Daily: Cornell Seeks Assistance Tracking Light Sail LoRa Signal

The Cornell Alpha CubeSat mission is seeking assistance in receiving telemetry from its light sail ChipSats which will be transmitting telemetry via LoRa transceivers. The light sail is expected to be active for a 48 hour period before reentering earth’s atmosphere. Currently, the CubeSat containing the light sail is expected to deploy from the International Space Station on December 2nd at 3:20 AM Eastern Time. The light sail is expected to deploy from the CubeSat a few days later.

Alpha is a 1U CubeSat developed by students of
the Space Systems Design Studio at Cornell
University. Among several technology
demonstrations onboard, the primary mission
objective is to deploy a retroreflective laser sail
into low Earth orbit. The light sail fully separates
from the CubeSat and becomes its own free-flying spacecraft thanks to gram-scale flight
computers, “ChipSats,” mounted to the sail.

The ChipSats will transmit telemetry on 437.4 MHz. Additional details on receiving LoRa signals from the light sail are available here.

Source: Cornell University

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