In the afternoon of 21 June, Summer Solstice 2022, our PicSat team member Vincent Lapeyrère received a short email from Emmanuel Bertran at the CNRS Laboratoire Atmosphères, Observations Spatiales near Paris. It reads:

Bonjour Vincent,
C’est vraiment PicSat qui est en vie ?
Cordialement.
Emmanuel BERTRAN
CNRS – LATMOS”
 
(Hello Vincent. Is it really PicSat that is alive?”)

Emanuel was referring to a tweet posted by radio amateur Vlad Chorney (@EU1SAT) 12 hours earlier :

PicSat ACTIVE !!!

1k2 BPSK@IamPicSat #PicSat #AmSat #CubeSat pic.twitter.com/grxIjvy2bt

— Vlad Chorney ☮️ (@EU1SAT) June 21, 2022

In the hours and days that followed more and more radio amateur from all over the world reported on Twitter that they were picking up PicSat. The little satellite was clearly emitting beacons and the faithful and enthusiastic radio amateur community was picking them up.

We couldn’t believe it at first.

In the past few days since that message, we have been meeting every day online. Vincent, who is the only one of the team currently physically at the Paris Observatory at Meudon, with the e-help from all the others, has been able to reboot and start up the Engineering Model of PicSat, still in the PicSat room. Also, we managed to get the Ground Segment up and running. Mathias, working from Cambridge where he is now a Gavin Boyle Fellow in Exoplanet Science, in collaboration with the IT team at the Paris Observatory swiftly managed to get the PicSat website up and running (https://picsat.obspm.fr/home?locale=en). Through this website amateurs can upload their received data to a Data Base and that is happening as we write this message.

Today, with the help of the team and equipment at LATMOS, we were able to send a first TeleCommand (TC) to the satellite and get reaction! We gave an other try in the evening with L’Electrolab (@Electrolab_Fr). This is very exciting indeed!

After more than four years of silence, we are looking forward to find out all we can about our little PicSat still orbiting the Earth at about 480km altitude. We hope that we can even continue our mission and test the telescope onboard. Even though the purported transit of the planet around Beta Pictoris has past, being able to test this technology will be of great value for future missions.

Stay tuned for more!

On the afternoon (in Paris) of Tuesday 20 March 2018 PicSat suddenly fell silent, after two successful morning passes over Europe. Attempts to re-establish contact have failed, nothing has been heard from the satellite, no sign of life. There was a short-lived hope that PicSat was heard on Friday 30 March by a team at the Morehead State University, but it radio amateur W2RTV was the first to manage to decode the faint signal and turned out to be another satellite (TIGRISAT). Today, Thursday 5 April 2018, the team decided to call mission-closed. A “pot” (French for party / drink) was organised at noon at the Paris Observatory in Meudon. Sylvestre Lacour did a short speech. Four radio amateurs who have been PicSat fans and great supporters joined in via a dedicated Google Hangout. A short video can be seen here. The team will continue to try to understand what went awry, while plans for new projects are being made. PicSat was operational for over 10 weeks. From a technological point of view it has been a success for the LESIA laboratory of the Paris Observatory – PSL, for whom PicSat has been the very first nano-satellite complete built and opereated in-house. This experience will open doors for new nano-satellite projects in the (near) future.

 

Yesterday 20 March PicSat has suddenly fallen silent, stopping to emit telemetry data.

The mission has been going really well, in spite of a problem with the Attitude Determination and Control System, the solution of which is well under way. 80 radio amateurs from around the globe have been contributing to the mission by receiving and sending the decoded telemetry to the PicSat Data Base. This has proven extremely useful for the team!

The cause of the sudden silence is not known at this point. The last beacon was received from Brazil by Roland Zurmely, PY4ZBZ, yesterday at 13:17:37UTC. If nothing happens in the 72 hours following the last communication, yesterday at 11:20 UTC, then the Watch Dog should be kick starting the satellite and get everything back operational again. Everybody waits and hopes to see this coming Friday 23rd March. In the mean time, the team tries to find out more about what could have caused the sudden stop of communication.

Busy day today! The CNRS has sent out the press release for the launch. Please find here the French version and the English version.

Launch is on for the early morning of 12 January 2018 at 4h58m local Paris time. It can be followed live on http://webcast.gov.in/live/.

ISRO has made a formal announcement with a nice brochure to it.

Stay tuned!

 

PicSat has been in India at the ISRO Sriharikota launch base since last month, and PicSat team members Mathias Lowak and Lester David have been on site to make sure that all is OK.

The launch is foreseen to happen on Friday 12 January at 4h48m AM Paris local time (9h28m local time in Shriharikota). It will happen on the PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) mission C40, together with a collection of other CubeSats and the larger Cartosat mission. After the ignition of the rocket, it should be about 20 minutes to reach the altitude of 505km where PicSat it to be released from its launch pod. The initialisation sequence is then automatically started, and 30 minutes later the antennas will deploy.

Then somewhere between 8 and 10 in the morning local time, we expect to receive a signal from PicSat as it passes of the Paris region.

We are all very excited with the prospect of having our satellite finally up in Low Earth Orbit soon!

 

After a short appearance during the week-end of December 2 – December 3, 2017, our brand new PicSat website is finally coming back online !

This website describes the mission and its objective, and it will be used throughout the mission to provide a way for all radioamateurs listening to the satellite to upload the data they received, and collaborate to our mission.

Retrieving all the the photometry of Beta Pictoris 24/7 to detect an exoplanet or some exocomets passing in front of it will be hard. And we know that. But we hope that with the support of the community, we will be able to do just that!

We are in the final stage of our pre-launch activities in Meudon. PicSat is still on the ground, but it will soon fly to India and start its journey to space. In the meantime, we will connect this website to our “engineering model” (a spare copy of the satellite that we keep on ground), so that you can have an idea of what our data look like. Some maintenance has to be expected during the next few days.

But we promise: as soon as PicSat is in space, this website will show the true uncorrected raw data coming directly from it! We hope you’ll enjoy this opportunity to see how a space mission is operated, and to get an idea of the sparsity of data we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis…

Don’t forget to check our Twitter account IamPicSat for the latest news!