ESA – LEDSAT is launched

The student satellite, designed less than the Fly Your Satellite! programme, was successfully launched on Vega flight VV19 at 03:47 CEST from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. 

The LEDSAT staff and associates of the Fly Your Satellite! group held a small on the web gathering to look at the launch and share their journey to launch with other learners taking part in ESA Schooling programmes.

The 2nd mission for Vega this 12 months was a easy trip. The initially phase carried the Vega rocket for the very first 100 seconds, soon after which it separated from the launch car or truck. The 2nd and 3rd stage took the rocket and its payloads additional into orbit, separating one by a person, with the remaining 4th stage, the AVUM, launching the payloads into their remaining orbits.

The deployment of LEDSAT into orbit took place about 100 minutes just after launch, at 05:31 CEST, about the Gulf of Mexico. The CubeSat deployer pushed LEDSAT into a Sun-Synchronous Orbit of 540 km with a Area Time of the Descending Node (LTDN) of 22:30.

LEDSAT is not the only ESA-supported passenger on this Vega mission. CubeSats Sunstorm and RadCube are technological innovation demonstrating missions supported by ESA’s Technological know-how directorate.

The approximate Two-Line Factor (TLE’s) of LEDSAT is:

LEDSAT
1 00000U 21000ZZZ 21229.14658565  .00000000  00000-  19534-3    18
2 00000  97.5470 303.0250 0015700 227.0950 165.8334 15.06634481000003

LEDSAT’s antenna deployed approximately 50 minutes soon after deployment, enabling LEDSAT to get started transmission. This took position at 06:20 CEST, over the Indian ocean, shut to the west coastline of Australia.

If you are a radio novice, now is the time to listen for LEDSAT! Locate additional aspects about the radio newbie competition and how to pay attention for LEDSAT here.

The LEDSAT group will be ready to get the first alerts from LEDSAT and start the commissioning stage, in which they will go about each individual subsystem of LEDSAT and be certain the position is prepared for the operations section. The commissioning stage is predicted to get around 1 month, after which LEDSAT operations is predicted to get 1 to two yrs.

In the operations stage, LEDSAT will flash its LEDs when in the eclipse of Earth for ground-based mostly telescopes to look into how the LEDs can be utilized to optically track a CubeSat.

The LEDSAT mission has been formulated with each other with astronomers to not interrupt research pursuits. The LEDs are expected to have a magnitude involving 8 and 13, this means they will not be seen to the bare eye, considering the fact that the eye can see down to a magnitude of 6. The magnitude scale is reversed, that means a higher magnitude is much less brilliant. The LEDs will also be much significantly less invasive to the night time sky than an airplane’s strobe light on a crystal clear evening sky. The LED payload can also be turned off at any time by the LEDSAT staff.

Congratulations to the LEDSAT team from Sapienza College of Rome for a successful launch and ideal of luck as they enter the following phase of their house mission.

Locate much more information on the LEDSAT site.