An animation showing most of the Aalto-1 mission phases.
Aalto-1 is a student satellite project of Aalto University, Finland. When launched, it will be Finland’s first satellite. It is planned to operate at VHF-UHF and there will also be an S-band transmitter. Up to 8 watts of power will be available from the solar panels.
The main payload of the satellite is a novel tiny Fabry-Perot imaging spectrometer, developed by VTT, Finland. The primary scientific goal of the mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of MEMS Fabry-Perot spectrometers for space applications. This miniature technology can be used in nanosatellites for large a variety of remote sensing applications in the future.
High spectral resolution images can be used for water quality monitoring and land use classification.
VO-52 seems to be down, it hasn’t been heard in the last couple of days. I hope that the ground station in India will give some information about the status of this great Satellite soon.
Today we put up a multi band antenna that can be used for 28, 21 and 14 MHz. The next couple of days we will give Oscar 7 a try when it is in mode A. I hope noise levels are much lower in mode A then in mode B. It is very difficult to work stations because of the high noise level when the satellite is in Mode B and is descending to the north.