Tracking Briz-M 17-18 September 2009

Flight plan

The Proton-M rocket with the Nimiq-5 satellite took off from Baikonur at 1919 UT on 17 September 2009. It flight profile is shown in the graphics below taken from ILS's web site. I have added the time of a few critical events.

 

Mission events
Event # Mission elapsed time Mission event

1

00:02:00

First/second stage separation

2

00:05:27

Second/third stage separation

3

00:05:43

Payload fairing sepration

4

00:09:41

Third stage/Briz-M separation

5

00:11:15

Briz-M ignition for a 6:35 min burn

6

00:17:40

Briz-M shutdown

7

01:07:40

Second Briz-M ignition for a 17:30 min burn.

8

01:25:10

Second Briz-M shutdown.

9

03:29:04

Third Briz-M ignition for a 14:03 min burn

10

03:43:07

Third Briz-M shutdown.

11

03:43:57

Auxuliary tank jettisoning.

12

03:45:24

Fourth Briz-M ignition for a 03:18 min burn

13

03:48:42

Fourth Briz-M shutdown.

14

08:53:30

Fifth Briz-M ignition for a 08:56 min burn

15

09:01:26

Fifth Briz-M shutdown.

16

09:15:00

Spacecraft separation

Summary of receptions

Summary of receptions
Date 2009 Time (UT) Frequency MET (hr:min) Remarks
17 Sept 2054.50-2101.48 1020.5 MHz 01:36-01:43 Single carrier first then two 12.8 kHz apart from 2057.45 UT
17 Sept 2317.40-2321.00 1020.5 MHz 03:59-04:02 Single carrier. C/N=15 dB. Command-off.
17 Sept 2322.30-2339.00 1020.5 MHz 04:03-04:20 Three? carriers between two 12.8 kHz apart.One carrier: 2335.10 UT. Dmax 2337. Off watch at 2339
18 Sept 0032.10-0123.19 1020.5 MHz

05:13-06:04

Center carrier, two side carriers +/- 16 kHz. Present at start of waterfall. Strong. Command-off.

18 Sept 0428.30-0436.00 1020.5 MHz 09:10-09:17

Center carrier, two side carriers +/- 16 kHz. Strong signals. Command-on and command-off.

I think that the maximum doppler shift occured at 2337 UT. Up until 2339 UT I swicthed to 1018.5 MHz many times but never picked up any signals. After 2339 UT I left the computer to record a waterfall spectrogram on 1020.5 MHz so I could not check 1018.5 MHz.

Signals on the second pass

I let the computer write on the spectrogram every 30 seconds. This may have been a mistake for I missed large parts of the signals. However, it can clearly be seen that the modulation had now switched to carrier plus two extra carriers at +/- 16 kHz (see below).

 

The final signal burst

The last signals picked up from this mission appeared on 1020.5 MHz from six minutes before spacecraft sepration until two minutes after spacecraft separation.


Back to Space Tracking Notes