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Space Bulletin 004 ARLS004
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington, CT June 27, 2019
To all radio amateurs
SB SPACE ARL ARLS004
ARLS004 LightSail 2 Launches, Will Transmit CW Beacon
The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 CubeSat, launched on June 25,
will transmit Morse code from space. LightSail is a citizen-funded
project to send a small spacecraft, propelled solely by sunlight,
into Earth’s orbit. The innovative satellite is due to be deployed
on July 2 from Prox-1, a Georgia Tech student-built spacecraft the
size of a small washing machine. Once deployed, LightSail 2 will
automatically transmit a beacon packet every few seconds, which can
be decoded into 238 lines of text telemetry describing the
spacecraft’s health and status, including everything from battery
status to solar sail deployment motor state. Every 45 seconds, the
spacecraft will transmit “LS2” on the spacecraft’s frequency of
437.025 MHz, within the Amateur Radio 70-centimeter band.