Yesterday was an intense day for all the Humsat-D team. We arrived to the HUMD-OPS Control Center at 6:00 UTC to follow the launch and the payloads separation sequence.
The Unisat-5 satellite separation occurred at 07:25:48.330 UTC, a great success of the Gauss team as a result of their hard work. Thank you from the Humsat-D team!
The first contact with Humsat-D was expected at 10:22 UTC. We were in silence hearing the noise from the transceivers for more than 5 minutes, a long wait, and suddenly…. there it was! The first Humsat-D beacon!
75 seconds after the beacon, we received the telemetry containing all the parameters of the satellite. All of them indicated that the health of Humsat-D is very good.
As we didn’t have a good TLE we decided to pospone the execution of the “First contact” procedure until the next pass.
Around the 11:57 UTC we contacted again with Humsat-D. This time we sent a “ping” command to the satellite and we obtained the expected response: a “pong” and the most recent telemetry on-board generated. After that, we requested the satellite to send us the telemetry from the first moments of the mission. The data we got were extremely interesting.
We generated some graphs showing the evolution of some of the parameters:
The battery recharged as expected during the sunlight periods up to its maximum level. We can also observe in the plot the battery discharge during the antenna deployment and the communication periods with the ground station in Vigo.
We also received telemetry from the temperatures in the internal subsystems and also on the external surfaces. You will find down below a graph showing the temperatures at the solar panels:
Today we started the commissioning phase of the mission: we will verify that all the subsystems are working as expected and we will also tune some of the parameters of the satellite (on-board time, telemetry collection intervals…).
We will try to keep the blog updated with all the operations during the mission. So, stay tuned! ;).
