EagleSat Lab

The EagleSat is a research and design lab for the EagleSat space grant project. The first CubeSat design is to create a testbed to analyze the degradation of data on the current solid-state memory devices used today, such as flash memory, SD cards, memory sticks, etc.

It has been hypothesized that the radiation belt in the upper atmosphere of our planets could destroy these devices' ability to store information actually, and we are going to test that. The CubeSat has also been equipped with a GPS device so our students can track the degradation of the orbit of this satellite. There is quite a lot of space debris circling our planet, and not much is known about how long these objects will stay there. Hopefully, with a known mass, launch altitude and trajectory, we can learn a bit more about these objects orbiting our planet in low earth orbits. Once launched, the satellite ground station on campus will be able to communicate with this satellite for nine minutes every day as it passes overhead.

Descriptions of modulation formats and communication protocols for EagleSat-2

The UHF transceiver onboard the EagleSat-2 satellite periodically transmits telemetry signals on a 435.7 MHz radio frequency (RF) band. This is an amateur radio (ham radio) frequency band.

AX.25 protocol is used for telemetry transmissions between the satellite and the ground station located at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott Campus. Any ham radio operator with the capability to decode AX.25 will be able to decode the telemetry data.

The modulation format used is 2-GFSK, and the ITU emission designator is 50K0 F1DA.

EIRP from the satellite is 31 dBm, from an altitude of 410 km (apogee) and 408 km (perigee), at an inclination angle of 51.64 degrees.

The orbital period for EagleSat-2 is 92.68 min.