Violet Amateur Radio satellite

Violet is an Amateur Radio satellite being built at Cornell University for launch early 2011. The name derives from its ultraviolet telescope, which includes flight-spare Deep Impact CCDs.

The satellite is a 50cm cube satellite and will carry 4k8 UHF simplex packet links with 5 watts of RF downlink power. It will use a star tracker and fiber optic gyro for fine attitude estimation and propagation.

Violet will allow guest investigators to utilize multiple CMG arrays to test and validate CMG steering laws, maintain a communication link, downlink data for use in steering law validation over multiple orbits, acquire the sun and charge batteries when necessary.

A launch to LEO by the Air Force Research Laboratory is planned not before January 2011.

A submission for frequencies has been made to the IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination panel.

More information is available at http://cusat.cornell.edu/violet

Violet on the IARU Satellite Coordination Pages
http://www.amsat.org.uk/iaru/formal_detail.asp?serial=167