ISIS Launch Services weblog

During the second and higher elevation pass over Europe the UWE-2 satellite has also been heard by its team in the groundstation. All other satellites have also been heard and telemetry has been decoded, making this launch 100% successful!

PSLV-C14 was launched on time and as planned, followed by successful deployment of the CubeSats UWE-2, BEESAT, ITUpSAT1 and SwissCube.

ISIS would like to thank the following parties for making their much appreciated contribution to the success of this ISILaunch01 campaign (in no particular order):

• ANTRIX /ISRO
• UWE-2 team
• BEESAT team
• ITUpSAT1 team
• SwissCube team
• Astro- und Feinwerktechnik Adlershof GmbH

• All personnel at Satish Dhawan Space Center, in particular at the Rohini Guesthouse and SP1B
• All employees of ISIS
• NLR
• Bradford Engineering
• Gelders Forwarding
• CalPoly and SRI
• NORAD
• Orbitron

On a lighter note, for making the ISILaunch01 trips to India very pleasant, we would like to thank:

• South Park Hotel, Thiruvananthapuram
• Lemon Tree Hotel, Chennai
• Pride Hotel, Chennai
• Kingfisher
• Qatar Airways
• Jet Airways
• The Arabian Sea & the Sea of Bengal (without the sharks)

We wish our CubeSat teams all the best for their satellites, a long mission life and many telemetry frames of course.

During the 9:30 UTC pass over Europe three out of the four satellites have been heard. Both ITUpSAT1 and BEESAT have been heard by their own groundstations and both have received indications that all is well with their satellites. Members of the ISILaunch team have been able to hear the SwissCube satellite using a groundstation in Delft.

The next pass over Europe is around 11:00 UTC and we hope to have more information after that.

Directly after the launch the orbit took the satellites directly over the western part of the United States. Thanks to efforts by CalPoly and SRI, the teams have been able to confirm that at least two of the four satellites are transmitting beacon data. The two satellites that have been heard are SwissCube and ITUpSAT1.

We continue to wait for the first passes over the groundstations of the teams in Europe, which should occur around 09:30 UTC.

Just after 17 minutes into launch all the satellites have been successfully separated and injected into a nominal orbit.

We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the teams on this fantastic achievement!!

The launch vehicle ignited right on time and the launch has been perfect so far.

The final launch readiness polls have been conducted and all has been declared ready for launch. The vehicle is on its own power and the satellite is ready for launch. The range has also given a ‘go’ for launch. The automated launch sequencer has started at T-10 minutes and there is essentially no way back from here.

Only one hour left to go until lift-off of the PSLV-C14 with the ISILaunch01 satellites on board. Everything is still ready to go at the launch site. Several final launch vehicle checks have been performed and everything came back positive.

Today is the big day. Everything is ready for launch, even the weather is quite cooperative with a nice sunny morning here at Sriharikota, with a temperature just above 30 degrees C.

With just over 2 hours to go, we will go to the Mission Control Center and the live viewing site here at the launch site in a moment. Reports from the launch will be provided via the ISIS office in Delft, through the CubeSat channel on IRC and through this weblog regularly.

All the best to the four CubeSat teams, anxiously waiting at their ground stations for the first signals from space (we know how it feels ).

There are less than 14 hours to go on the countdown clock, and all is still ‘go’ for launch.

Note that the launch time is now officially set at: 11:51hr IST, or 06:21 UTC. The launch window is 15 minutes.

Today we finalized the preparations for communications with ISIS in Delft and the teams at their respective locations. We also contributed to make an offer to the temple here at the launch base, as a prayer for a good launch.

During a preparatory visit to the Mission Control Center (MCC) today, we were also provided with the latest preliminary orbit parameters. Those were converted to the following TLEs and given in the sequence of deployment:

ISILaunch01 UWE-2
1 99999U 09999P   09266.27738472  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0 00018
2 99999 098.2960 000.8503 0002212 328.3707 241.0884 14.50336350000001

ISILaunch01 ITUpSAT1
1 99997U 09999R   09266.27761620  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0 00017
2 99997 098.2891 000.8462 0003965 047.3461 163.3305 14.50931852000009

ISILaunch01 BEESAT
1 99998U 09999Q   09266.27807917  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0 00018
2 99998 098.3002 000.8533 0002378 350.5091 222.5822 14.50491512000005

ISILaunch01 SwissCube
1 99996U 09999S   09266.27831065  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0 00017
2 99996 098.2862 000.8438 0005852 035.1139 179.1923 14.51386990000002

Notes with respect to these TLEs:

• The TLEs have been put together by ISIS with the greatest care, but we can not guarantee their correctness.
• As they are based on the preliminary orbit parameters, they are also preliminary.
• Both the satellite number and the international designator are arbitrarily chosen by ISIS. Obviously these items will be determined (by others than ISIS) once the launch has taken place and each satellite has been identified.
• The epoch time used is in UTC.
• The First Time Derivative of the Mean Motion, Second Time Derivative of Mean Motion and BSTAR drag terms are set to zero as no information about these parameters of each CubeSat is known.