Delfi-n3Xt baby sounds...

This morning I got up earlier today to attend the Delfi-n3Xt launch event in our faculty. Delfi-n3Xt is a nano-satellite (the size of a milk carton) which is built by students and staff of our faculty. Launch events are always exciting, because you don't know what will happen. But after two stressful hours we got the confirmation, "Nano-sat number 7 successfully deployed." This was followed by some cheerful cheers. However, was it turned on?

This blog started with some post about listening to satellites using the ground station on top of EWI (faculty of electronic engineering, mathematics and computer sciences). This ground station is mostly set up by a student which I assist in teaching him to track satellites. So this gives me the opportunity to get the telemetry data of the Delfi-n3Xt quite fast. It's good to be a teacher :). The next figure will show the satellite's first sounds in space:


Click on the figure to get a larger view. In the bottom left corner of the blue figure, an S-shaped curve can be noticed. This is the radio signal transmitted by the moving satellite in a frequency-time plot. The vertical axis is frequency and the horizontal axis is time. You clearly see the frequency of the satellite shift with time. This is of course the Doppler effect (please read my blog entries). 

These are the first baby sounds of the Delfi-n3Xt, the second Dutch university-constructed satellite in space. Fully operational! This clearly shows the capabilities of engineering students. Well done.



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