Ham radio and Artemis 2

Before I get to that, a short update on the comet story. While I haven't seen an actual headline comet MAPS appeared to break apart in a video I saw that was made as the comet was getting close to going behind the blocked out visual center of the Lasco camera's center of view. The latest view, time tagged at the same 2306 UTC that previous posts displayed, shows nothing has come out from near the sun. 

This tells me that the comet was ripped apart by something in that environment. Not only is this not unexpected, it's rather common for these Kreutz sungrazers. 

Late in the afternoon, I ran across an interesting story for those of you interested in radio, ham radio, and experiments you can do yourself.  It focuses on how hams are tracking Artemis 2.  It opens with what I find to be an interesting thing I haven't heard yet. Three of the four Artemis 2 crew are hams. Commander Reid Wiseman, is KF5LKT;  Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen is KF5LKU, the next call issued, and Pilot Victor Glover is KI5BKC (so he's been licensed longer). You'll note that the only astronaut who isn't a ham is the YL Mission Specialist Christina Koch. 

The story itself is from a Vancouver, British Columbia newspaper called the Vancouver Sun. Vancouver is about as far as one can get from Florida's Kennedy Space Center and still be in North America. The story they present is almost entirely centered on Vancouver native named Scott Tilley who is apparently not a ham, they never say or give a callsign for him but a contractor on a program NASA started. 

This week, he is tracking NASA’s Artemis II rocket as one of 34 individuals and organizations from around the world selected by the American space agency to monitor its first crewed mission to orbit the moon in more than 50 years. 

Here's where the ham community kicks in. QRZ member K6CLS adds: 

The 13cm EME guys are tuning in. Orion xmits downlink on 2216MHz +/- 2.5MHz. easy to see the continuous signal with some gain from a dish and a good preamp.

To look at the spectrum, some folks are using a down converter to an SDR, or an SDR that can work on 2216MHz, or a spectrum analyzer directly!

Can see the chips in the signal, so it looks like QAM something, but I'm sure it's more complex.

Several folks have reported they can see the Doppler shift in the mark tones.

Fun stuff!

As you can see by him specifying the downlink at 2216 +/- 2.5 MHz, is part of S-band (2.0 to 4.0 GHz) communications (the way NASA is using it), the 13cm ham band is close to the 2.4 GHz WiFi band, so some folks online may have some means of tuning in the band - if you're comfortable working with microwave frequencies near that to tack in coax or power splitters, amplifiers and other kinds of modules.  EME is Earth-Moon-Earth communications or Moon Bounce. Wikipedia notes, 

"The first Earth-Venus-Earth contact by amateur radio operators was established on the 13 cm band in 2009."

That's in case that Earth-Moon-Earth stuff is too easy for you. I honestly didn't know anyone anywhere had done Venus Bounce or EVE before.

If you're interested in trying to put something together to listen for Artemis 2, I don't know of any really easy, off the shelf solutions because I haven't looked. A quick look at some broadband SDR companies whose products I've used don't show any that are rated for 2.0GHz to, well, anything. That basically just implies that you need to use a block downconverter from 2216 MHz down to something you have that would allow you to play with the signal. I'll have to play more with this idea.