Last week we had an ESTCube workshop at Tartu Observatory and during this event we agreed about experiment plan. According the plan we are spinning up the satellite at least two times up to 360 degrees per second rotational velocity (in ~100 deg/s steps) and then monitoring rotational stability and natural spin-down. During that time, a lot of logs will be gathered and downloaded. While they contain data about sensors, they are organized in non-ascii file form onboard the satellite and are not easy to interpret.
After spin-up tests (they take about 2 weeks as planned originally) and analyzing data from those tests, satellite will be spun up again to 1 RPS and tether endmass launch lock will be burned. Because we do not know if the tether is intact or destroyed during the launch, we plan to monitor the release of endmass using our on-board camera. You could be able to follow downloading of those (hopefully extremely boring :-)) images.
When we don’t see any flying-away endmass on images and satellite rotation law is not changing, most probably the tether is still intact and after releasing tether spool lock, we will start reeling the tether out. During that process, images will be taken again, hopefully showing tether and endmass deployed more and more.
Finally, when we succeed in deploying the tether, high voltage will be applied on it. And again – a lot of measurements from every kind of attitude and electricity sensors.
In between all of those bigger steps, at least couple of days battery charging will take place. Electricity production from solar cells has dropped quite a bit and charging fully requires a lot of time now. We plan to update our power system hardware in such way that it disables COM completely for most of the orbit (i.e. all the time except over the Europe), allowing much faster charging times. Nevertheless, all those test and charging cycles most probably take up to two months all together.