After several weeks and months of excitement, the European Space Agency confirmed that all on-board subsystems of the ESEO student satellite are up and running, the orbiter is receiving telecommands and the in-orbit commissioning got underway.
In early December 2018, we reported that after successful injection into orbit, the ground stations have successfully received the beacon signals from ESEO. Nevertheless, for weeks, the satellite could not receive telecommands sent from ground, so members of the ESEO family celebrated New Year’s Eve amid excitement. Students of the University of Bologna and the University of Vigo, working closely with SITAEL, the industrial prime contractor, and the European Space Agency for weeks of hard work, finally managed to telecommand the satellite and succeeded in bringing ESEO from safe mode to nominal operating mode. ESEO’s telemetry data indicated that all on-board subsystems are up and running, including the power distribution system developed by the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). After the satellite having brought to nominal operating mode, the in-orbit commissioning of the satellite has got underway in the past few days. This phase is expected to last a couple of weeks, after which ESEO’s 6-month nominal mission can start, including operation of the ESEO-TRITEL experiment coordinated and supported by our research centre and the Langmuir-probe (ESEO-LMP) experiment of BME’s students!
ESEO mission Control Center - ESA and ESEO student operators monitoring ESEO (credits: ESA).
The ESEO-TRITEL team
ESEO is an educational hand on project of the ESA Education Office, carried out as part of the ESA Academy programmes.
The activity of the University students’ teams was coordinated by SITAEL S.p.A. (Italy), System Prime and Integrator of the whole spacecraft platform.
The ESEO-TRITEL project is realized in the frame of PECS contract No. 4000112065 and the ESA PRODEX contract No. 4000124167.
For further information contact the https://www.esa.int/Education/ESEO.