University of Illinois provides details of ION Cubesat

Purvesh Thakker, the Program Manager of the Illinois Observing Nanosatellite (ION), provided additional details of this cubesat which will be launched on June 28, 2006.

The University of Illinois is looking for amateur radio operators who can listen for ION's beacon, which will begin transmission on 437.505 Mhz immediately after launch.
The beacon is sent in plain text over AX.25 every 5 minutes.
A TNC in monitoring in connection-less mode should be able to copy the beacon.

Send beacon reports to cubesat@ece.uiuc.edu with your name/location, any data that you receive, time of contact, and signal strength.

The ION cubesat's scientific mission includes:

+ An experiment to measure oxygen airglow emissions from the Earth's Mesosphere to helps scientists understand how energy transfers across large regions of the atmosphere.

+ A new MicroVacuum Arc Thruster (µVAT) with high dynamic range. This will provide the satellite with a versatile low mass satellite propulsion system capable of lateral movement and finely controlling attitude.

+ Testing of a new utilizing a Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) processor that is radiation hardened through system design techniques.

+ Testing of a small CMOS camera for Earth imaging.

+ Testing of ground based attitude stabilization.

Interested amateurs are invited to subscribe to a low volume ION e-mail list by sending a message to:
cubesat-l-subscribe-request@listserv.uiuc.edu

The ION website can be found at: http://cubesat.ece.uiuc.edu

Purvesh Thakker

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