AMSAT P3-E Status
Dear All,
First of all I have to apologize for the little information about the P3-E progress over the last few month. Indeed, I gave an update during the recent AMSAT-UK Colloquium and also our AMSAT-DL magazine has a lot of information, which will be reprinted in the AMSAT-NA Journal and other sources with some delay.
To improve communications with our membership and worldwide audience, we decided last year to improve the information flow on our website using a new content management system(CMS, Mambo).
Unfortunately this took much longer than anticipated, but the new portal should be available to the public by December.
The CMS itself is almost fully functional, but we have to transfer and re-edit all the information from our old website. You can probably imagine, that this is still a lot of work.
However, once it is running, we hope to put more information on-line and also have a news section with more regular updates. Indeed, because of this, we almost stopped updating the old website..
So far, AMSAT P3-E is making good progress, but slowly. Some modules have already arrived in Marburg for the integration, but other module builders make good use of the additional time due to the yet unknown launch date, which sometimes makes it also hard to motivate the people.
The wiring harness is defined and will be build and integrated into the S/C soon. Thanks to the CAN-bus and our CAN-DO module controllers, it will be not such a big beast as on previous P3 satellites. Talking about the CAN-DO, another radiation testing was performed.
This time irradiation with protons. The CAN-DO module and other selected electronic components for P3-E and P5-A were exposed to protons with an energy of 60 MeV. The CAN-DO module stopped operating at 61 krad, which is good for a projected mission duration of more than 10 years. Since
the CAN-DO module is one of the most critical parts on P3-E and P5-A, this gives us a better feeling and that it should not suffer from a radiation induced failure.
Very good progress was also reported from the development teams of the new IHU-3, both in terms of hardware and
software. While a big step forward was made, the full integration and testing of the operational IPS software and all it s functionality (including the turbo codes and software defined modems) is next. Within the next couple of weeks, a radiation testing is also planned for the IHU-3.
In addition to the analog transponders flying on P3-E, we will also look into the possibility to have an SDT (software defined transponder) flying on P3-E for the first time. The recent developments on Software Defined Radio technologies and STELLA, as reported previously here, might give us completely new ideas. While this is quite late and various details must still be discussed, the necessary RF
interfaces are already available in the module space we have identified for this. Expect to hear more about this in the next few weeks.
As mentioned before, an extremely critical step was taken a few days ago, when Ariane 5 scored a double success for Arianespace with the successful launch of Syracuse 3A and Galaxy 15 on-board flight V168.
While we do not yet have an official launch manifest, we are in full contact with our partners at Arianespace. Everyone is working hard to find a suitable slot for P3-E to the benefit of both sides. While the year 2005 is almost over, our target to get P3-E into orbit is still
2006 and will remain so. Clearly, the continuing success of the new Ariane 5 will help us too. Initial arrangements for environmental testing, including vibration and thermal vacuum testing are already made.
Indeed, we still need a lot of support for P3-E and donations. But with all the contributions we are receiving, P3-E will be truly another international satellite. I m in particular delighted, that AMSAT-NA joined and supports the P3-E project. We have excellent personal relationship between our organisations and apart from the fun,things
are developing really good to the benefit of EAGLE, P3-E and all the projects on the horizon.
Best wishes
Peter Guelzow, DB2OS
President AMSAT-DL
P3-E Project leader
Klla: amsat