Amateur radio – Page 9 – Daniel Estévez

Tianwen-1 TCM-1

On 2020-08-01 23:00 UTC, Tianwen-1 made its first correction manoeuvre, called TCM-1. The manoeuvre was observed by Amateur trackers, such as Edgar Kaiser DF2MZ, Paul Marsh M0EYT, and the 20m antenna at Bochum observatory, operated by AMSAT-DL. The news of the successful manoeuvre appeared in Chinese media, and in the German Wikipedia article for Tianwen-1 (thanks to Achim Vollhardt DH2VA for sharing this information).

Since Tianwen-1 transmits its own real time orbit state vectors in the telemetry, by comparing the vectors transmitted before and after TCM-1, and also by studying the Doppler observed by groundstations on Earth, we can learn more about the manoeuvre.

Tianwen-1 manoeuvre and high-speed data

On the Beijing time morning of 2020-07-30, Tianwen-1 did something. Paul Marsh M0EYT reports that the probe first switched from the high gain antenna to the low gain antenna, then returned to the high gain antenna, and then switched to a high-speed data mode, finally coming back to the usual 16384baud telemetry.

r00t.cz has already analysed the telemetry data collected during this event. He reports that the high speed data was a replay of the telemetry produced during the period when the low gain antenna was used. He shows some interesting behaviour on APIDs 1280, 1281 and 1282 (see my previous post for a description of these during nominal operation). These seem to contain ADCS data.

This event was followed with some expectation by the Amateur deep space tracking community, since according to this paper Tianwen-1 would make the first correction manoeuvre (TCM-1) early on in the mission (day 9 is stated in the paper). However, by now it is clear that a true correction manoeuvre didn’t happen, since no significant change has been seen in the trajectory described by the state vectors transmitted in the spacecraft’s telemetry. However, this event might have been a very small thruster firing, in order to test the propulsion in preparation for the true TCM-1.

In this post, I look at the data during the high speed replay, following the same approach as in the previous post. With this data, I reach a definite conclusion of what happened during this event (I won’t spoil the mystery by stating it in advance). The description of the modulation and coding used by the high speed data will come in a later post.

The Jupyter notebook for the calculations in this post can be found here.

Tianwen-1 telemetry: framing and data

This is a follow-up to my previous post, where I explained the modulation and coding of Tianwen-1’s telemetry. In this post I will explain the framing structures and the data contained in the telemetry (though we only understand a few of the telemetry channels). Most of what I’m going to explain here was found first by r00t.cz and is already presented in his Tianwen-1 page. In this post I’ll try to give a bit more detail (especially for those not so familiar with the CCSDS protocols) and some Python code for those interested in digging into the data.

Tianwen-1 telemetry: modulation and coding

As promised in this post, I will now speak about how to demodulate the Tianwen-1 telemetry signal. This post will deal with demodulation and FEC decoding. The structure of the frames will be explained in the next post. In this post I also give a fully working GNU Radio decoder that can store frames in the format used by the orbit state vector extraction Python script.

Tracking Tianwen-1’s orbit to Mars: part II

Yesterday I published a post explaining how Tianwen-1 is transmitting real time state vectors for its own orbit in its telemetry and how we’ve used those to propagate its orbit and track the spacecraft with the Bochum observatory 20m dish. However, there seemed to be some problem in the way we were interpreting the state vectors, since the ephemerides derived from these had a pointing error of a few degrees when compared with observations from Bochum and other smaller Amateur stations.

As of writing that post, I believe I have found the problem. It has to do with the way that the timestamps from the state vectors are interpreted. After correcting this problem I am getting an orbit that matches the observations well. Here I explain this problem and show some more details about the corrected ephemerides.

Tracking Tianwen-1’s orbit to Mars

Last Thursday 2020-07-23 at 04:41 UTC, Tianwen-1, a Chinese mission to Mars consisting of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, launched from Wenchang. Usually, I would be posting an analysis of a recording of the telemetry signal, made by Paul Marsh M0EYT or another of my Amateur DSN contributors, as I did a few days ago for the Emirates Mars Mission. However, something amazing has happened that has kept me quite busy. Rest assured that the analysis of the signal will come in a future post, but here I’m going to tell a story about Tianwen-1’s orbit.

Decoding Emirates Mars Mission Hope

Last Sunday 2020-07-19, the first mission of United Arab Emirates to Mars, known as Emirates Mars Mission “Hope probe” launched from Tanegashima, Japan. This probe is expect to reach Mars in approximately 200 days and study its atmosphere over the course of two years. The scientific instruments onboard the probe are a digital camera, an infrared spectrometer, and an ultraviolet spectrometer.

Shortly after launch, several Amateur radio operators and Amateur spacecraft trackers received signals from the X-band beacon of the Hope probe at 8402.655 MHz and posted reports on Twitter, such as Paul Marsh M0EYT, Ferrucio IW1DTU, Edgar Kaiser DF2MZ, and others. Since the spacecraft was still near Earth, its signal was so strong that a data modulation with a main lobe of approximately 20kHz wide and several sidelobes could easily be seen in the spectrum, which is shown below.

Emirates Mars Mision Hope X-band downlink spectrum

Paul has been quite kind to send me a recording that he made with his station on 2019-07-19 at 23:29 UTC and I have been decoding the data in GNU Radio and looking at the frames. The recording can be downloaded here (193MB). It is an int16 IQ recording at 99998 samples per second. This post is an account of my results.

BY02 telemetry beacon

BY02 (also known as BY70-2) is an Amateur cubesat by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and Beijing Bayi High School. It was launched on July 3 on a CZ-4B rocket from Taiyuan together with a Gaofen Earth observation satellite. BY02 is intended as a replacement for BY70-1, which was launched on 2016-12-28 and was placed on a short-lived orbit that decayed in a few months because of a launch problem.

Today, Wei Mingchuan BG2BHC announced on Twitter at 09:14 UTC that BY02’s beacon was on and would be left on at least until 12:50 UTC. I believe that this is the first time that the beacon has been on for an extended period of time, since during the early operations the beacon was only active on passes over China.

Since at 11:39 UTC there was a good pass over Spain, I went outside with my handheld Arrow 7 element yagi to do a recording. This post is an in-depth analysis of this recording and includes an explanation of the coding and telemetry format used by BY02.

Receiving Arecibo in HF

The well known Arecibo observatory, besides being used as a radiotelescope and planetary radar, has a powerful HF transmitter that is used to artificially excite the ionosphere, in order to study ionospheric effects using 430MHz incoherent scatter radar. More information about this can be found in the HF proposals page of the observatory web, and in this poster that details the characteristics of the HF facilities.

The HF transmitter has a power of up to 600kW and can use the frequencies 5.1MHz and 8.175MHz. At those frequencies, the dish has a gain of 22dB (13º beamwidth) and 25.5dB (8.5deg) respectively, so the power that is beamed up to the ionosphere is huge. The 430MHz incoherent scatter radar is even more powerful, with up to 2MW. For an introduction to ionospheric incoherent scatter radar, see this lecture by Juha Vierinen, which explains why such huge powers are needed, due to the very weak radar return of ionospheric plasma.

A few days ago, on Wednesday 24, Chris Fallen tweeted that the Arecibo transmitter was active at 5.1MHz. According to the telescope schedule, which can be seen in the figure below (click on the image to view it in full size), there was an experiment that involved the HF transmitter on 2020-06-24 from 18:00 to 22:00 UTC, on 2020-06-25 from 17:00 to 21:00 UTC, and on 2020-06-26 from 17:00 to 21:00 UTC.

gr-satellites FSK BER

A few months ago I talked about BER simulations of the gr-satellites demodulators. In there, I showed the BER curves for the BPSK and FSK demodulators that are included in gr-satellites, and gave some explanation about why the current FSK demodulator is far from ideal. Yesterday I was generating again these BER plots to check that I hadn’t broken anything after some small improvements. I was surprised to find that the FSK BER curve I got was much worse than the one in the old post.