## 3 On Orbit Operations and Anomaly Analysis  
IDEASSat was successfully launched into a near circular orbit of 525 km altitude from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 24 January 2021 aboard the Transporter 1 SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. Upon power on and activation, IDEASSat FSW would enter safe mode or phoenix mode depending on the battery SOC, entering nominal operations only when the SOC allowed and a ground station command permitting nominal operations was received. During this period, the spacecraft would broadcast a beacon signal over the UHF amateur band at a fixed period. Amateur radio operators around the world could receive IDEASSat beacon signals, and could also help to provide tracking data through the open-source satellite ground station receiving network--SatNOGS. The first beacon signal from IDEASSat was received at T + 4 h by an amateur radio station in Germany, indicating that the spacecraft had survived launch, deployment, and had powered on successfully [32]. The flight data in this beacon packet as displayed by the IDEASSat mission operations software interface is shown in Figure 17. The content of the satellite beacon packets was mainly housekeeping data for the spacecraft, including the temperature and power status of the spacecraft subsystems, as well as reboot counts, received command counts, as well as bad command counts. Notably, the spacecraft was confirmed to have booted in safe mode, with the expected subsystem power states. The temperatures, voltages, and current draws of the spacecraft subsystems were within acceptable operational ranges. It should be noted that the anomalously low S-band temperatures were not real, and were due to the S-band transmitter not being powered on in safe mode. The spacecraft ADCS was confirmed to be engaged in Sun point mode, indicating that 3-axis attitude control had been activated. The battery state of charge was also found to be a very healthy 95.28%. Although IDEASSat was tracked successfully by ground stations in the SatNOGS network, as well as at INSPIRE partner institutions, the UHF ground station at NCU was initially unable to successfully communicate with the spacecraft following launch. This was found to be due to long-term environmental degradation of the outside components of the ground station, as well as the output power of the USRP-2900 being insufficient to drive the Tx amplifier. This was not detected during the end-to-end test, as the range of the spacecraft on-orbit was considerably farther than during the end-to-end test, ranging from 522 to 2600 km. Figure 16: Orientation of IDEASSat when inserted into the QuadPack. Dynamic rail position indicated by red circle. This anomaly was rapidly corrected through replacement of the antennas and cabling, as well as the installation of a preamplifier between the SDR and the primary UHF amplifier. These problems were factors not considered in the link budget calculation during the design phase. Figure 18 shows the content displayed by the NCU ground station software upon receiving the satellite beacon for the first time on 1 February 2021. Immediately following launch, the spacecraft was maintaining a stable safe mode, with a high SOC of 97.34% and 3-axis attitude control. It is notable that FSW had autonomously rebooted the UHF transceiver twice by this time, while the ADCS had been rebooted once. Table 11 shows a log of notable events during the periods of spacecraft contact, indicating the status of the NCU ground station and the spacecraft at key time points, as well  
Figure 17: The first IDEASSat beacon packet received at approximately T + 4 hours after launch. Figure 18: Contents of the first IDEASSat beacon received by the NCU ground station. as key events occurring at that time. The spacecraft maintained a stable safe mode with high SOC from launch until 15 February 2021, during which flight data was continuously downlinked via SatNOGS and the NCU UHF ground station.