Technische Universität Berlin’s mostly COTS based 1U CubeSat series ”BEESAT”, was launched over the last decade. After outliving their primary mission, operations were taken over by the student operations team StudOps and in the scope of lectures. Three of these missions recently came to an end-of-life through natural decay within a six-month period. This provided the opportunity to observe the satellites behavior prior to and during early re-entry. Furthermore, lessons learned during previous re-entries could be imminently applied to subsequent re-entries. The state of the BEESAT satellite bus is assessed after operating for a decade in orbit and the remaining orbit dwell time is continually predicted. Increasing spin up is observed in the days leading up to the re-entries. The SatNOGS network of amateur radio ground stations is involved to track the satellites. It can be confirmed that the tracking of the satellites as well as Doppler shift corrections are a challenge during the final days in orbit as TLEs provided by NORAD outdate rapidly. Further measures to track the satellites directly via radio frequency satellite tracking are evaluated. Lessons learned from the re-entries of BEESAT-2, -3 and -4 will be applied to upcoming re-entries like the one of BEESAT-9.
Lessons learned from operating three CubeSats until their consecutive re-entries
Small Satellites Systems and Services Symposium (4S 2024) ; 2024 ; Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Proc. SPIE ; 13546
2025-03-20
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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