E1P telemetry

You may still hear from E1P from time to time, however it is nearing end of life. Basically the batteries are no longer accepting sufficient charge to take us through eclipse. Even in full sunlight the power input from the solar arrays has dropped so low that, combined with the paucity of battery reserve, we are no longer power positive during transmissions. We know that the several months of overcharging when we were in full sun at all times has not been good for the batteries.


daylight pass


eclipse pass (with entering into sunlight at the end of the pass)

Recently even in sunlight, the satellite is in a marginal power situation — we have occasionally heard beacons, but the beacon transmit seems to draw enough power out of the system to cause voltages to sag, resulting in power down and reset. On a very recent pass, we heard two beacons (but could not decode them), separated by about 4 minutes — the ~4 minutes is apparently the recovery and reset time for the processor to come back on.

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