Hello all,

I'm glad to announce that after more than a year of preparations, tomorrow, 16.09.2014, we are starting to deploy the electric solar sail tether on-board ESTCube-1.

The process of burning the tether end-mass and spool locks and reeling out the first few centimeters of tether will start during the 09.06 - 09.19Z pass over Estonia. This is a high pass and should be visible over most of the Europe.

The next good passes listed below (all in UTC) will be used to download images the telemetry logs and the images: 10.43 - 10.56 18.39 - 18.51 20.15 - 20.28

During the locks release process and after reeling the tether out some centimeters, images will be taken.

The other shorter passes during the day will be used to download the experiment data as quickly as possible (in Estonia, all daily passes are visible, but lowest ones are just couple of degrees above the northern horizon).

If everything is OK with the tether, additional unreeling will take place in coming days.

If you are interested in receiving ESTCube-1 during those exciting passes, the UZ7HO 9600 bps packet softmodem and an Online Telemetry Decoder by Mike Rupprecht (http://www.dk3wn.info/files/estcube_online.zip) can be used. But basically any 9600 bps G3RUH TNC or decoder can be used to receive ESTCube-1.

We are looking forward to receiving your reports on the address es5e AT estcube DOT eu, and we would really appreciate if you would also send received data in live, using Mike's decoder.

With best wishes, Tõnis Eenmäe de ES5TF