Yesterday I posted about decoding the data in an X-band recording of BepiColombo. I only made a very shallow analysis of the data, which consisted of CCSDS TM Space Data Link frames. However, I showed that most of the data was transmitted on virtual channel 7. A few hours later, Oleg_meteo in Twitter noted that this data in virtual channel 7 was just a 511 bit PN sequence. After some analysis I’ve confirmed what Oleg_meteo said and shown another interesting and unexpected property of this data.
All the Space Data Link frames in virtual channel 7 have a first header pointer field of 2046, which means “idle data only”. When the payload in these frames is concatenated (there are 8792 payload bits per frame) we obtain an infinite sequence that fits the following description.