ALT This weekend, the mission operations team successfully commissioned our customer’s hosted payload. Given ongoing communications constraints, described in more detail below, this is an amazing achievement as the payload was commissioned using only the low-bandwidth telemetry, tracking, and command (“TT&C”) system. After a period with strong connectivity using the high-bandwidth communications system, several weeks ago we identified an electrical power subsystem (“EPS”) issue on Quark-LITE.

ALT The vendor-provided EPS was producing errant telemetry, and two of Quark-LITE’s eight battery packs were displaying very high temperatures. The mission operations team diagnosed the issue and sent software updates and commands to burn the fuses on the two affected battery packs. Our team confirmed that one battery pack was successfully isolated. While the team worked on burning the second fuse and determining the cause for the failed burn command, EPS performance degraded further, impacting the use of our high bandwidth radio. Gluon, which uses the same vendor-provided EPS, began to present EPS issues as well. The root cause assessment and recovery is still underway.

ALT The mission operations team elected to prioritize commissioning and operating a customer’s hosted payload. While this payload operation was intended to be performed with high-bandwidth communications, the team successfully implemented several additional software updates to commission the payload using only the intermittent TT&C low-bandwidth communications. The team is now working with the customer to move through a series of experiments.