12/02/2025

A group of students at Cornell University is seeking participation from
radio
amateurs who are equipped with satellite stations for help in listening
for
signals from a retroreflective laser sail that is scheduled to be
deployed
later this week. The sail is currently attached to a 1U CubeSat that
was
launched early Tuesday, December 2, 2025, from the International Space Station,
but will separate and become its own free-flying spacecraft equipped
with four
tiny "ChipSat" flight computers that will transmit telemetry data back
to
Earth.

This is the first flight of their ChipSats, and it is this data that
the
students seek help detecting, according to Ph.D. candidate Joshua Umansky-Castro, who has an amateur radio license; call sign KD2WTQ. The
light
sail's ChipSats will be transmitting data using the LoRa? digital
protocol on
437.400 MHz. The sail, stowed within the CubeSat, is expected be
released a
couple of days after deployment - tentatively this Thursday, December 4
- and
will likely function independently for no more than 48 hours due to the
drag
created by the sail.

Additional information, including LoRa parameters and links to a list
of
compatible receivers and the decoder file, may be found at alphacubesat.cornell.edu[1] in the ChipSat Ground Station Guide[2]
(docx).

It is hoped that the ChipSat and light sail will become the trailblazer
for
future missions around the solar system, and one day to our closest
stellar
neighbor, Alpha Centauri.


[1] https://alphacubesat.cornell.edu/
[2] https://cornell.app.box.com/s/n4se5ku0ltjb1of2piagfz1y7xa92n47
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