Artist's impression of SSETI flying high over Europe

ESA Award for SSETI Express telemetry download competition

The Education Department of ESA, the European Space Agency, is delighted to announce details of the award that will be offered to the amateur radio community in relation to the downloading of telemetry from their SSETI Express student-built satellite.

The award will be given to the amateur who submits the largest number of valid telemetry and payload packets, regardless of which band it is received on.

SSETI Express is scheduled for launch on September 27th from Plesetsk in northern Russia at approx 06:52 UTC.

It will downlink telemetry and payload data in AX25 format at 9k6 on 437.250MHz and at 38k4 on 2401.835MHz. It will
later also be available for radio amateurs to use as a single channel FM transponder

All radio amateurs around the world are encouraged to download the necessary software from the http://www.sseti.org/express/ website (this will be available
from approx 12th September) and to use the SERACC system to forward the telemetry and payload data to SSETI Express Mission Control. Submissions will be automatically recorded and the leaderboard will be shown on the website.

The winner will be offered the opportunity to visit the STEC06 Conference and Exhibition in Germany in Spring 2006. STEC, the Student Technology Education Conference, follows previous events in 2004 in Lausanne in Switzerland and in 2005 in Aalborg in Denmark.

The three day event is similar to the AMSAT-NA Symposium and the AMSAT-UK Colloquium but with more breakout technical sessions in addition to the Keynote Speeches. The meetings are always interesting and thought provoking and great enthusiasm and passion is shown by all the attendees. The post meeting attitude adjustment sessions have also proven to be exciting.

The winner will also be encouraged to present a paper on how he/she achieved their success - but this is not mandatory!

In addition to attending the STEC 06 Conference, the winner will be invited to visit ESA's Mission Operations Centre - ESOC - near Darmstadt in Germany where they will be given a private escorted tour of the facilities. ESOC currently controls the many exciting orbital and deep space ESA missions and will be responsible for the European Columbus module when it joins the International Space Station

For more information on the STEC events - check
http://www.stec2005.space.aau.dk/ to see what this year's event included and for a few details of the ESOC facility, visit http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESOC/

The winner will be the amateur at the top of the leaderboard at 00:00 on Jan 1st 2006. The prize will include economy class travel from your home location, accommodation and a "small" daily subsistence allowance.

AMSAT-UK wishes to congratulate and thank ESA for their generous prize, a first in the field, and is confident that it will add to the great enthusiasm for the SSETI Express project which already exists within the amateur radio community.

It will be a great opportunity for us to demonstrate that the amateur radio groundstation "network" is a valuable resource for satellite projects which are able include useful amateur payloads

Video of the launch of SSETI Express will be streamed live to the web at: mms://wm9.btrichmedia.com/hcatv

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