HERON Mission Operations Lead
Things for Ben to Handoff
- [x] Shared ISED Spectrum Management System account login info with Reid, Khang, and Christina
Important Dates
- August 7th, 2024: HERON starts overwriting its memory
- January 11th, 2025: Last day to re-apply for an ISED site approval for AlbertaSat’s ground station before the current site approval expires
- March 1st, 2025: Our ISED site approval for AlbertaSat’s ground station expires (this has not been set to renewable)
- March 31st, 2025:
- Deadline to pay annual fees for ISED Space Station and Site-Approved Earth Station Spectrum Licenses for the 2025-2026 government fiscal year
- Our ISED Site-Approved Earth Station Spectrum License expires (but it has been set to renewable, so you just have to pay the fees for it to remain valid)
- Our ISED site approval for the Bahen ground station expires (this has also been set to renewable, so you just have to pay the above fees for it to remain valid)
- August 2nd - 7th, 2025: Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah
- September 29th - October 3rd, 2025: International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, Australia
- March 31st, 2043: Our ISED Space Station Spectrum License expires
Higher Priority Tasks
The following are mandatory tasks that must be completed.
1. Establishing Contact with HERON
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⚠️ Reminder: We have 270 days post-launch before HERON starts overwriting its memory. If HERON was able to power on successfully, then it has been collecting telemetry since it launched on November 11th, 2023. If we want to avoid losing any of that data, we need to start downlinking it before August 7th, 2024.
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Needless to say, the top priority is to establish contact with HERON. This will involve continuing to perform pass attempts with our ground station on a regular basis. It may be helpful for you to review the mission operations plan once you’ve established contact with HERON. I’ll leave it to you to come up with some creative things to do with HERON once we’ve entered the nominal operations phase of the mission.
Swarnava mentioned that he wants to attempt communicating with an operational satellite first to prove that our ground station works before attempting contact with HERON again. The leading candidate for this test is BDSat-2.
The remaining unidentified objects from the initial batch of Transporter-9 deployments are:
- NORAD ID 58287 - Object AH