Curium One observed from Dwingeloo

On July 9, 2024, with the first launch of the Ariane 6 rocket, various cubesats were placed into orbit around the Earth. One of these cubesats was Curium One, which was developed with contributions from the Libre Space Foundation. One of the goals of this satellite was to demonstrate a new communication system.

Unfortunately, it soon became apparent after the launch that no signals from Curium One could be received by conventional ground stations. However, when we aimed the Dwingeloo Telescope at this satellite, we were able to detect signals on the first attempt. These signals were very weak, which explains why smaller ground stations couldn’t detect anything. To determine what was wrong with the satellite, the creators studied the data from Dwingeloo. It was found that, although the signal level was much too weak, many parts of the satellite were functioning properly. The most plausible explanation for the weak signal is that the antennas did not deploy correctly.

Unfortunately, we can no longer hear the satellite even with the Dwingeloo Telescope: the first observation where we detected nothing was on July 22 at 17:00. It seems that between July 21 and 22, the satellite was switched off.

Besides the Dwingeloo Telescope, no one else has detected this satellite, making the seven observations from the Dwingeloo Telescope extremely important for the creators. The Dwingeloo observations also show which of the Ariane 6 cubesats is Curium One, so that the team can track the correct satellite in future observations.

All observations can be viewed on SatNogs. The high resolution image shows the received data packages, each 0.1 seconds long.