Monthly Archives: December 2013

Detected GAIA spacecraft

Detected the GAIA spacecraft travelling to the L2 point.

Gaia Spacecraft

GAIA Spacecraft

ESA GAIA

ESA GAIA Mission

The frequency is 8465 MHz and for the moment don’t have ephemeris from the JPL/Horizons or spice kernels. For the moment using the ephems from GBOT getting a aprox RA and DEC and using my own tools for full tracking.

GAIA detection

GAIA detection

Gaia sidebands

GAIA sidebands

 

Successful reception of the Yutu landing

Yesterday the Chang’e3 spacecraft andt the Yutu rover was landing successfuly. I was start to track the moon since the 18:30 to the 22:30 UTC. And I was listen Yutu from the start of my window and the signal was over 15dB of SN at 1Hz of BW.  The frequency of the rover is 8462.08000MHz with the moon doppler of -0.6Hz/s of aprox. The signal was easy to listen in the earphones, and sounds like a some kind of morse.

For this event I was setup two receivers, as main a AOR AR5000 and Rfspace SDR14. As second receiver a rtl-sdr doongle with r820t tuner and baudline.

Yutu rover, using AR5000 + SDR14

Yutu rover, using AR5000 + SDR14

Yutu rover using rtlsdr + baudline

Yutu rover using rtl-sdr + baudline

The command line to use rtlsdr with baudline was:

rtl_fm -g 44 -d0 -f$1 -s 250000 -F -U | ./baudline.static -stdin -samplerate 250000 -channels 1 -session rtlsdr1chUSB0 -basefrequency $1

Yutu rover using rtlsdr + baudline

Yutu rover using rtlsdr + baudline

Now you can listen how sounds the data stream from Yutu. A short audio record of the signal demodulated: