Phoenix Blog

Feb. 19th, 2020 ~ Deployment Day!

We are very happy to announce that Phoenix was successfully deployed this morning from the International Space Station, and has now entered it's orbit about the Earth! We were lucky enough to view Phoenix's deployment from the Marston Exploration Theater in ISTB4. Cameras were set up to capture the team's reaction to the moment of deployment as well, which you can watch below! In addition, the team also live streamed the deployment event via Twitch, and saw multiple people join in to watch the event from other locations. In spite of the very early morning, deployment has definitely been one of the most incredible parts of the project, and we are very excited to see what awaits us in the operations phase. A special thank you goes to Ric Alling, Will Hall, and the student workers who woke up very early to allow us to watch Phoenix deploy in this environment, which made the event all the more memorable. As well, we would like to thank Nanoracks for sharing a live stream of the Phoenix's deployment for us to enjoy.

A Special shoutout goes to our last minute kapton tape solution that kept our battery inhibited after integration into the Nanoracks deployer. Phoenix is proof that tape really does solve all engineering problems.

The first sighting of Phoenix occurred roughly 30 minutes after deployment by a ground station located in Indonesia. The first contact with our spacecraft from the ASU Ground Station was around 7:13am that morning as well. Amateur operators continued to track the spacecraft throughout the day and share its health beacon with the team, which allowed us to keep tabs on the state of the spacecraft between its passes over ASU. A very special thank you goes out to these individuals for their assitance in verifying that our spacecraft was alive and well. As for the next steps of the project, the first few weeks will be spent just collecting telemetry and event logs from the satellite to verify that it is in a healthy condition, and testing commands to ensure the satellite responds appropriately. In addition, we will also work to verify Phoenix's orbital parameters so that we can continue to track it over the next few years. Once we feel comfortable operating Phoenix from a distance and ensuring that all of our commands work as previously tested in our lab, then we will uplink a schedule commanding our spacecraft to take its first image of Phoenix, AZ.