Just at the end of last week our commanding was successful in awaking FIREBIRD Unit A from its long sleep — after more than 4.5 months of hibernation in low Earth orbit. The spacecraft seems mostly health — strong bus voltages, and is taking science data.
Now we are working with the satellite to upload commands to reconfigure its state to a more desireable operating state. We may be increasing the beacon rate from 1-minute cadence to perhaps 15-seconds cadence, in order to get more beacon data from around the world. We are very much interested, as we work these early recovery operations, to get as much beacon data from Hams around the world as possible in order to have better visibiliy into its performance. Please help us get the word out to active hams who have the ability to receive data at 19.2 kBaud that we are keenly interested in getting their data from FIREBIRD Unit A.
Thanks again, and we’ll keep you up to date.
73, Dave
KD7MFJ