Author Archives: Allison Craddock

RAX-2 was recently featured on the blog “The Space Review,” which covers recent developments in the SmallSat community.  The article discussed numerous CubeSat missions that presented at the SmallSat conference at Utah State University this past August. According to the … Continue reading →

MXL director and RAX Co-PI Prof. James Cutler and several student team members are at the annual SmallSat conference in Logan, Utah this week. The lab will be participating in the university poster session, which will be on view throughout … Continue reading →

RAX-2 recently transmitted its 200,000th beacon, a feat which reminds the team to be thankful to all the HAMs whose volunteer efforts made this milestone possible. RAX is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study anomalies in space … Continue reading →

We’re excited to announce that our colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder will be using modified RAX beacon decoding software on their newest CubeSat, the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE).  Ben Kempke, chief engineer of the RAX … Continue reading →

Today the RAX team and alumni are celebrating RAX-2’s 200th day on-orbit. RAX-2 was launched just eleven months after the launch of RAX-1, and has already surpassed RAX-1’s time on-orbit. To date, we have received over 152,000 beacons, an achievement … Continue reading →

Several current RAX team members and alumni participated in this past week’s CubeSat Developers’ Workshop; hosted by the California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, California. John Springmann, RAX project manager and doctoral candidate, gave two presentations: On-orbit Performance of … Continue reading →

Two Line Elements (TLEs) are specific orbital elements for a satellite at a  certain orbital epoch.  TLEs are the conventional approach for orbit tracking for CubeSats.  Updated TLEs are provided approximately once a day and published online by NORAD.  For example, … Continue reading →

Members of MXL have been working with a Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) modeling group who has captured the RAX mission as an example for their modeling framework. See more info and the paper that was presented this week here.

The graph below depicts temperature data from out latest beacons from R2.  This data is measured by temperature sensors directly on the boards of the spacecraft, and transmitted in beacons to our ground stations. The blue dots are the flight … Continue reading →