Congressional Legislation to Remove Satellites from ITAR

The House of Representatives in the U.S. Senate recently passed a bill, H.R. 3288, with a clause to remove ITAR restrictions on commercial satellites. The specific wording for the purpose of the bill:

To authorize the President to remove commercial satellites and related components
from the United States Munitions List subject to certain restrictions,
and for other purposes.

Full test of the Bill can be found in PDF here:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3288ih/pdf/BILLS-112hr3288ih.pdf

Status of the bill:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3288

This bill only pertains to commercial satellites, and does not include scientific or educational in its current form. Make your voices heard and please write to your Representatives for the inclusion of these terms. Removing educational, scientific, and commercial satellites from ITAR control will help foster the international small satellite community.

Representatives Howard Berman, Don Manzullo, Adam Smith, Mike Coffman, Dutch Ruppersberger, Rob Bishop, Gerry Connolly, Jason Chaffetz, and Martin Heinrich introduced the bill, and are the best people to contact regarding updates and changes.

Scheduled Website Maintenance

CubeSat.org will be taken down temporarily this Saturday, December 17, 2011 for scheduled maintenance. We will be down for an undetermined period of time, although we hope to be back online by Monday.

Our mailing list will not be touched, and will be available for communicating with the CubeSat community at large despite the downtime.

Status: Delayed.

We are considering other options, and the downtime may have to wait until after the Holiday Season

On October 28th, 2011 at 2:48 AM Pacific, the Delta II carrying NPP also carried three P-PODs and 6 CubeSats into orbit. All three P-PODs deployed successfully and ground operators around the world are tracking the CubeSats.

Six CubeSats are set to launch on October 28th aboard a Delta II rocket with the NPP primary spacecraft from Vandenberg AFB in California. The start of the launch window is 09:48:01 UTC (02:48:01 Pacific). Below is information about each CubeSat including tracking information and links to the university websites. Up to date launch information can be found at http://spaceflightnow.com/delta/d357/status.html.

Satellite: AubieSat-1
Organization: Auburn University
Downlink Freq: 437.475 MHz
Transmit Power: 0.708W
Protocol: Morse Code
Baud Rate: 20wpm

Satellites: DICE (two satellites)
Organization: Utah State University
Downlink Freq: 465 MHz
http://www.sdl.edu/programs/dice

Satellite: Explorer-1 [PRIME] Flight Unit 2
Organization: Montana State University
Downlink Freq:  437.505 MHz
Transmit Power: 0.85W
Protocol: AX.25 FSK
Baud Rate: 1200
http://ssel.montana.edu/e1p/

Satellite: M-Cubed
Organization: University of Michigan
Downlink Freq: 437.485MHz
Transmit Power: < 1W
Protocol: GMSK
Baud Rate: 9600
http://umcubed.org/

Satellite: RAX-2
Organization: University of Michigan
Downlink Freq: 437.345 MHz
Modulation: GMSK
Baud Rate:  9600
http://rax.engin.umich.edu/

TLE's (updated 10/28 17:45 UTC)

AubieSat-1
1 99994U 00000    11301.47668397 0.00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0  0009
2 99994 101.7170 233.3515 0253078 295.4219 199.4389 14.78844727000003
E1P-U2
1 99995U 00000    11301.47668397 0.00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0  0000
2 99995 101.7170 233.3516 0253036 295.4215 199.4391 14.78836059000007
M-Cubed
1 99996U 00000    11301.47668397 0.00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0  0001
2 99996 101.7170 233.3516 0252994 295.4212 199.4393 14.78827391000008
RAX-2
1 99997U 00000    11301.47784144 0.00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0  0001
2 99997 101.7120 233.3563 0249329 295.8687 205.1174 14.78254351000006
DICE-F
1 99998U 00000    11301.47899884 0.00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0  0000
2 99998 101.7172 233.3525 0248007 295.2070 211.9601 14.77706209000007
DICE-Y
1 99999U 00000    11301.47899884 0.00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0  0001
2 99999 101.7171 233.3526 0247935 295.2033 211.9635 14.77691071000003

For those of you supporting us on launch day, don't forget to join the IRC channel. Information about the channel can be found at http://www.cubesat.org/index.php/collaborate/ground-operators. A web-based IRC client can also be found at http://polysat.calpoly.edu/irc/.