## DSLWP-B and the lunar eclipse

As you may well know, last Friday 27th July there was a total lunar eclipse. This is an interesting event for lunar-orbiting spacecraft such as DSLWP-B. In fact, depending on the spacecraft’s orbit, it may also pass through the Earth’s umbra or penumbra. Here I look at the trajectory taken by DSLWP-B during the eclipse.

K2SAT is a cubesat developed by the Aeroespace Systems and Control Lab in KAIST, a university in Daejeon, South Korea. It will be launched later this year, between September and October. The main mission of the satellite is to test the transmission of images taken with its onboard camera using an S-band QPSK transmitter that supports up to 2Mbps data rate. This will use the 2.4GHz Amateur satellite band, and the satellite has already coordinated a downlink frequency of 2404MHz. The K2SAT team at KAIST is the same one that built the QB50 KR01 (LINK) cubesat.

Since February, I have been collaborating with Pilwon Kwak and the rest of the K2SAT team to produce a GNU Radio receiver for the S-band image downlink and add it to my gr-satellites project. This receiver has now been publicly released. Here I explain the main details of the transmitter and protocol used by K2SAT and the implementation of the receiver.

## LimeSDR external reference quick HOWTO

To do accurate frequency measurements of Andrés EB4FJV‘s 2.3GHz beacon, I have needed to setup my LimeSDR to use my DF9NP 10MHz GPSDO as an external reference. This is a quick HOWTO with the steps to make the LimeSDR use an external reference.

## Comparison of DSLWP-B orbit determination with tracking files

In the last post I compared the results of my orbit determination for DSLWP-B using one lunar month of Doppler data with the observations in the VLBI experiment done on June 10. In this post I will compare my orbit determination with the tracking files published by Wei Mingchuan BG2BHC in gr-dslwp. These tracking files are produced from the orbit determination performed by the Chinese Deep Space Network using two-way S-band Doppler measurements.

The tracking files contain a listing of the position $$x$$ and velocity $$v$$ vectors for DSLWP-B in ECEF coordinates. The entries are given at intervals of one second. The tracking files can be used directly to compute Doppler as received in a groundstation. In fact, if the ECEF coordinates of the groundstation are $$x_0$$, then $$R = \langle x – x_0, v\rangle/\|x-x_0\|$$ is the range-rate, and so the Doppler can be computed as $$D=-fR/c$$, where $$f$$ is the downlink frequency and $$c$$ is the speed of light in vacuum. Here I have used this method to compute the Doppler according to the tracking files.

All the tracking files published so far have been considered in this study, except for the first two, which contained an incorrect anomaly at epoch. The figure below shows the residuals between the Doppler measurements made by Scott Tilley VE7TIL and my orbit determination (called “new elements”) and each of the tracking files. It seems that the residuals are quite similar.

The figure below shows the difference between the Doppler according to each of the tracking files and the Doppler predicted by my orbit determination.

It seems that the match is quite good for the central days, but not so good towards the edges. My orbit determination is numerically propagated from a single set of elements at MJD 28264.5 for the whole period, while the tracking files probably use different sets of elements that are propagated numerically over a few days only. Therefore it might happen that my orbit determination is affected by some accumulative error due to numerical integration or an inaccuracy in the force model.