DISCO-1 operations and groundstation

ITU is a partner of the Danish Student Cubesat Program, DISCOSAT. We launched our first satellite DISCO-1 into Low Earth Orbit in April 2023 and we will launch a second DISCO-2 in 2024. In this project you will gain experience with automating live satellite operations and communications, completing a groundstation at the Rued Langaards Vej site for use with both satellites.

The DISCO satellite radio transceiver is implemented as a hardware module and uses a networking protocol called CSP which runs over a GMSK modulated UHF radio link. Students at SDU have started implementing this protocol using software defined radio and we would like to complete this implementation and comission it on our own groundstation to enable 2 way communication.

Many of the operations of the satellite are currently done by hand using a command line application CSH. These need to be automated to control the three software experiments that are installed on the DISCO-1 satellite, an ML testbench, a cosmic ray camera and a file transfer protocol experiment.