OreSat0

Flight Heritage, we want it

The original OreSat mission was overwhelming for a first satellite, especially if you're building your own satellite system from scratch. Perhaps we should reference a speech about throwing your cap over a wall at this point.

Recently, in the middle of a pandemic you might have heard of, we received another opportunity to fly a CubeSat. There's no way our original satellite, OreSat, could have been ready by then. But what if we built a smaller satellite, one that had the sole purpose to test all of our critical subsystems?

Meet OreSat0 (pronounced "or-sat-zero"), a 1U CubeSat that provides "Flight Heritage" to the OreSat system. "Flight heritage" is a fancy way of saying "hey our satellite didn't catch fire when it flew in space!". When you're building a satellite system from scratch, proving your critical components in space before your main mission is an extremely good idea.

OreSat0 is a simple satellite: solar panels, batteries, radios, computer, GPS, and a star tracker. That's about it. Some people pejoratively call this kind of a satellite a "beepsat" or "sputnik", and we're fine with that. For this satellite, beeps equals success.

After a long, complicated backstory (that we're happy to tell you over a pint),  OreSat0 was handed off to Spaceflight in Seattle, Washington on February 28, 2022. It was launched to a 525 km sun synchronous low earth orbit aboard Astra's LV0009 rocket on March 15, 2022, and is now whipping around the planet at 8,000 m/s, happily beeping at us.

Mission: do not catch fire in space

Mission update: 2024-08-13
In space and totally not on fire! (Yet). See the bottom of this page for more updates!
 Click here for OreSat0's location and latest data packets

OreSat0's 1U CubeSat frame made from Aluminum that has been anodized black.

The inside guts; lots of cards!

Battery card. This is the part that's not supposed to catch fire.

Star tracker card

THANK YOU

Thank you so much to all of the people and organization that made OreSat0 possible. It was a tremendous effort, and you all made it possible.


Here's a more formal list of the systems inside OreSat0 (also see the technologies pages for source / CAD links):


Again, see the CubeSat Subsystems page for a description of the various subsystems.

2022-03-15: Launch on ASTRA LV009

OreSat0 was successfully deployed in a "dusk-to-dawn" sun synchronous low Earth Orbit by the Astra Rocket 3.3 on the LV009 mission. On our FIRST orbit, the Satellite Networked Open Ground Station (SatNOGS) system picked up our telemetry beacons!

2022-03-29: Mission Update

OreSat0 has automatically stopped beaconing because of a built-in two week "comms time out". If the satellite doesn't hear a "keep talking" packet, it goes quiet so we don't accidentally step on someone else's transmissions. So far, none of our "keep talking" packets from any of our ground stations have gotten through.  For more on our open source ground station project, see https://www.uniclogs.org/.

2022-10-23: Mission Update

We figured out why OreSat0 couldn't hear our "keep talking" packets: our primary L band receiver had an oscillating low noise amplifier (LNA) which is jamming any L band transmissions. To add insult to injury, our secondary UHF receiver has a firmware bug which turns off its LNA. This makes us -35 dB down for UHF receive, which is ... a lot. 

However, HUGE THANKS to the Stanford Research Institute and their slightly-larger-than-ours dish - we zipped down to Stanford, and blasted the UHF receive with the equivalent of 300 kW of radiated power from our little 10 W portable transmitter station we brought with us.

And OreSat0 woke up after 8 months in space! We received another 2 weeks of telemetry packets indicating everything was still working well.

2024-08-01: Mission Update

Ever since it's deployment at 525 km, OreSat0 has been slowly slowing down because of the little bits of Earth's atmosphere that make it up into low earth orbit. We're now down to 370 km, and we predict OreSat0 will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and become Oregon's first meteor shower sometime in 2025.