JAMSAT announces Amateur Satellite to Venus

AMSAT has received news from Japan that JARL/JAMSAT are collaborating with the Japanese University Space Engineering Consortium (UNISEC) to send an amateur radio payload into a Venus transfer orbit with the primary JAXA Planet-C Venus Orbiter mission planned for May, 2010.

UNITEC-1, developed by the teams who have already launched cubesats such as University of Tokyo's XI-IV, XI-V, and Tokyo Institute of Technology's CUTE-1, CUTE-1.7+APD has the following engineering missions:

1. Onboard computers developed by several universities will be tested in the harsh space environment in the form of a competition; i.e., the computer which can survive to the last in the radiation-rich deep space environment will win the competition.

2. Technologies to receive and decode very weak and low bit rate signal coming from deep space will be developed and tested.

3. Technologies to estimate orbit and signal Doppler shift of the satellite based on the received RF signal will be developed and tested. These technologies are essential for tracking and receiving signals from a satellite in deep space.

The UNITEC-1 team invites the support of amateur radio amateurs all around the world to participate in the receiving and data capture experiments in objectives 2 and 3, above.

They note that amateur radio operators working as individuals or in groups develop stations and techniques to relay their received signal reports and data to the UNITEC-1 control station. This is also a unique opportunity to propose amateur experiments or competitions to the satellite team.

UNITEC-1 will transmit a signal consisting of a CW beacon of about 1 bps speed. One experiment requiring the participation of several amateur radio earth stations would include the development of infereometric techniques to combine the received signals from several antennae to improve the received S/N ratio from the spacecraft out-
bound from earth.

The UNITEC-1 website provides the latest mission information (such as orbit parameters, data formats and current status). UNITEC-1 will be the first university developed interplanetary satellite as well as the first amateur interplanetary satellite. The team sincerely hopes that UNITEC-1 will provide unique and exciting opportunity for the radio amateurs all over the world to enjoy reception of signals from deep space.

The UNITEC-1 website can be seen at:
http://unitec-1.cc.u-tokai.ac.jp/en/news_en

Graham Shirville, G3VZV

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