ANDE LASERs ON at 04:45 EST over Wash DC

From the AMSAT-BB and Robert Bruninga:

At 04:46 Saturday Morning Eastern Standard Time we will turn on the lasers on the ANDE MAA satellite as it comes over the Washington DC area.

This is a horrid hour, and we do not expect anyone to look or to waste sleep trying, but we figured we should alert the amateur list just in case... Someone had an interest.

Remember that these are not visible lasers, but 800 nm (infraredbelow visual red). They would need a CCD and large telescope to detect them. They will be pulsing several times a second for 3 to 5 minutes. We do not expect any amateurs to see them nor to even look for them.

Just wanted to give you a heads up. Oh, and we had the wrong names on the wrong objects so the object with the lasers on it is ANDE MAA which is now object 29664 .

The ANDE telemetry on 145.825 should show when the command is successful. You would see a packet coming back from ANDE saying LEDS WAS OFF (meaning it just switched to ON). Those of you with familiarity with the Kantroincs TNC (that is all ANDE is) will notice that all we did to control the lasers was to hook them to a switch hooked to the front panel POWER LED. Since the Kantrnoics TNC has a LEDS OFF command to save power when the TNC is in a low power application, we set the default to be LEDSOFF. This way, we can use that command to turn on the 6 Watts worth of lasers easily.

Bob, Wb4APR

ANDE and RAFT-1 get AMSAT OSCAR numbers

SB SPACE @ ARL $ARLS001
ARLS001 ANDE and RAFT-1 get OSCAR numbers

ZCZC AS01
QST de W1AW
Space Bulletin 001
ARLS001
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington, CT January 9, 2007
To all radio amateurs

SB SPACE ARL ARLS001
ARLS001 ANDE and RAFT-1 get OSCAR numbers

AMSAT OSCAR coordinator Bill Tynan, W3XO, has announced that the RAFT-1 and ANDE Amateur Radio CubeSats have been issued OSCAR numbers. Both spacecraft were placed into Earth orbit from the spaceshuttle Discovery on December 21 and are projects of US Naval Academy midshipmen. RAFT-1 has been designated as NAV-OSCAR-60 or NO-60. ANDE has been designated as NAV-OSCAR-61, or NO-61.

''AMSAT-NA and I wish to congratulate you and your entire US Naval Academy Satellite Lab team for the successful construction, testing and orbiting of this very interesting spacecraft,'' Tynan said, responding to the request to assign OSCAR numbers.

The RAFT-1 and ANDE ham radio payloads digipeat 1200 bps packet on 145.825 MHz. Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, of the US Naval Academy Satellite Lab says that when RAFT-1 and ANDE are within view of each other, dual-hop packet relays are possible via the two satellites. When it's enabled, RAFT-1 has a PSK31 uplink from 28.117 to 28.120 MHz with the downlink also on 145.825 MHz.

For more information, visit the ANDE, RAFT, NMARS & FCAL Operations Web page, www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/ande-raft-ops.html.

NNNN
/EX