Dear members of the University Nanosat, Cubesat, and Amateur Radio
communities,
As many of you may know, the FASTRAC satellites built by students at
UT-Austin will be launched as part of the STP-S26 mission this upcoming
Friday Nov 19th (around 4:30 pm AST) from Kodiak, Alaska on board a Minotaur
IV rocket. The satellites will be placed into a 650 km altitude, 72 degree
inclination circular orbit. For those that don't know, the FASTRAC
satellites are the winners of the University Nanosat-3 Competiton and their
primary mission is to demonstrate enabling technologies for small
satellites.
The satellites have been designed the satellites so that amateur radio
operators can track them all over the world and to do so the team has built
a section on our website (
http://fastrac.ae.utexas.edu/for_radio_operators/overview.php) that allows
any amateur radio operator to upload data they receive from the satellites.
This serves two purposes which are that the website will parse and
graphically interpret the data received and also allows the team to collect
data from all over the world.
With this in mind we would like to invite you to track our satellites and
register on our website. All of the information to track the satellites is
available on the above website where we will be posting the most up to date
TLEs as they become available as well as any other pertinent information.
Also, we will be posting updates as the launch approaches on our website,
our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/fastracsats) and our Twitter page (
www.twitter.com/fastracsats) so make sure to chek them out.
Thank you for your help. 73,
Glenn Lightsey (KE5DDG) and Sebasti?n Mu?oz (KE5FKV)
FASTRAC Principal Investigator and FASTRAC Student Program Manager
