FIREBIRD II 

Mission Overview

The FIREBIRD II mission is a continuation of the FIREBIRD mission which launched two additional 1.5U CubeSats in January 2015 (FIREBIRD 3 and FIREBIRD 4). These two CubeSats were originally the Engineering Design Unit and flight spare for the FIREBIRD mission, but have been refurbished for flight.

Launch Date: January 31st, 2015

Spacecraft Overview

The FIREBIRD II spacecraft feature two major changes from the original FIREBIRD spacecraft: 

• The Electrical Power System was replaced with a new in-house design 
• The FIREBIRD IMM Solar Cell Experiment (FISCE) was added.

Status

Both Flight Unit 3 (FU3) and Flight Unit 4 (FU4) were launched on January 31, 2015 with the ELaNa X (SMAP) mission. All subsystems are working well and we have recorded and downlinked hundreds of microbursts to date.

FIREBIRD Flight Units 3 and 4 shown with antennas deployed.

Science Data Products

The latest science data products can be found here: solar.physics.montana.edu/FIREBIRD_II

Tracking

• Both FIREBIRD II CubeSats transmit AX.25 packets at 19.2kbaud with GMSK encoding. FU3 transmits at 437.405 MHz and FU4 transmits at 437.230 MHz.
• Two line element sets (TLE) encoding for the satellite's orbital position.
• Find the Mike Rupprecht (DK3WN) Telemetry Decoder software here.

Additional Information

FIREBIRD 3:

• https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2015-003B

FIREBIRD 4:

• https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2015-003C