Dear members of the University Nanosat, Cubesat, and Amateur Radio communities,
As many of you may know, the FASTRAC satellites built by students at UT-Austin will be launched as part of the STP-S26 mission this upcoming Friday Nov 19th (around 4:30 pm AST) from Kodiak, Alaska on board a Minotaur IV rocket. The satellites will be placed into a 650 km altitude, 72 degree inclination circular orbit. For those that don't know, the FASTRAC satellites are the winners of the University Nanosat-3 Competiton and their primary mission is to demonstrate enabling technologies for small satellites.
The satellites have been designed the satellites so that amateur radio operators can track them all over the world and to do so the team has built a section on our website ( http://fastrac.ae.utexas.edu/for_radio_operators/overview.php) that allows any amateur radio operator to upload data they receive from the satellites. This serves two purposes which are that the website will parse and graphically interpret the data received and also allows the team to collect data from all over the world.
With this in mind we would like to invite you to track our satellites and register on our website. All of the information to track the satellites is available on the above website where we will be posting the most up to date TLEs as they become available as well as any other pertinent information. Also, we will be posting updates as the launch approaches on our website, our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/fastracsats) and our Twitter page ( www.twitter.com/fastracsats) so make sure to chek them out.
Thank you for your help. 73,
Glenn Lightsey (KE5DDG) and Sebastián Muñoz (KE5FKV) FASTRAC Principal Investigator and FASTRAC Student Program Manager