On Wednesday, November 16, at 1:47 am EST, NASA successfully launched its Space Launch System (SLS) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as part of its Artemis 1 mission. At the SETI Institute, all hands were on deck. Both the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and the Unistellar citizen scientist network captured the Orion spacecraft.
ATA
Two of the antennas at the ATA were used to receive signals from Artemis 1 shortly after launch. The team used GNU Radio and Software Defined Radio (SDR) equipment to record data from the Orion spacecraft, and some of the ten CubeSats carried as secondary payloads.
“The main interest in receiving these signals is to study how spacecraft communications work,” said Dr. Daniel Estévez, GNSS engineer conducting the observations. "The is openly available documentation describing the standards used, but nothing beats having hands-on access to the signals transmitted by real spacecraft." As with other observations, the data recorded with the ATA will be published as open data and serves as valuable teaching material.
The CubeSats launched from the upper stage of the SLS after the trans-lunar injection burn. A singular aspect of the Artemis 1 mission is that it marks the first time that many small satellites were well beyond the low Earth orbit (LEO) where most CubeSats operate. These CubeSats have reduced capabilities but must communicate back to Earth over long distances. The signals from satellites give many examples of how to solve this engineering problem.
These CubeSats will fly to various destinations, including the Moon, asteroids, and interplanetary space. They will study different facets of the Moon and interplanetary travel, ranging from navigation techniques to radiation and biology. One of them will conduct a soft landing on the lunar surface.
For more information about Estévez’s work: https://destevez.net/.
Unistellar
On the Unistellar side, citizen scientist Keiichi Fukui captured the spacecraft from 1906 to 1909 UTC using the ephemeris of 1905 UTC from JPL Horizons System requested during the observation.
“Once again, citizen scientists using their Unistellar eVscope, witnessed the space human exploration program,” said Dr. Franck Marchis, Senior Planetary Astronomer at the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer at Unistellar. “More and more missions will go to the Moon in the coming years, so we expect our network to continuously monitor this activity, reporting on their orbit and brightness to help the engineers and scientists running those programs.”
During Orion's 25-day mission, it will travel about 40,000 miles past the Moon and return to Earth. Artemis 1 represents the beginning of the program to return humans to the Moon after 50 years. The mission provides an opportunity to gather deep data on space travel and daily conditions on the Moon's surface.
