This week marks a month and a half that QuakeSat has been in orbit. QuakeSat's batteries are fully charged, and despite the constant exposure to sun, QuakeSat continues to operate well.
In each upload, we are uploading about 30 magnetometer target collects for three to four days (10 per day) We upload target collection command files on Tues and Friday now.
Downloads are averaging about 400K per contact during a high elevation contact, and about 5 10-15 minute contacts per day. The actual downloads are 2/3 magnetometers, and 1/3 housekeeping, so we are getting about 1 MB of magnetometer data per day. Our pre-flight goal was 3 MB per day (but we did not count housekeeping data and overhead for getting the flight computer to do the right thing). We will be "tuning" the system to get more, and this means getting "condensed" housekeeping (decimating 1 per sec files into 1 per 4 sec files). We are also trying to get more efficient in the PFR/PFS process (packet handshaking between the ground and the satellite). This is taking some additional software programming and may be ready at the end of next week
The time correlation between the flight computer and ground computers was tracked (up to 20 sec offset in the beginning). Now, the ground computers are all synched to network time (UTC) and the flight clock is checked each pass and updated before each targeting cycle. It appears that we are drifting off 1-5 sec between uploads and the new tracking procedure will allow us to adjust for this offset.
The satellite IR sensor data shows that we are moving past the earth-to-cold space terminator within 230-280 sec. If it is actually going from space to earth to space to earth to space...etc. then the nutation period is really 460-560 sec. per oscillation. More work is required to nail this down.
Temperatures are running between 25 deg F (tip of boom in eclipse) to 138 deg F (CPU) in hot part of cycle. The eclipse is going to zero in a few days (part of the dawn-dusk sun synch orbit we have). We expect the temperatures to rise somewhat since there will be less cooling.