Listen to a deep space satellite as it returns home

We've covered dozens of projects on getting images of Earth's weather directly from the source. It's not too complicated to download images directly from our constellation of weather satellites, but what about space weather? We have satellites for that too, of course, but to see the Sun well they are out of reach of most home ground stations.

That's about to change, however, as STEREO-A returns to our neighborhood after a 17-year absence, making citizen science a reasonable proposition. The STEREO mission - Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory - was launched in 2006 with a pair of satellites in heliocentric orbit. STEREO-B was lost in 2014 due to a navigation problem, but STEREO-A has spent much of the intervening years observing the Sun's back relative to Earth. As [Scott Tilley] explains, the satellite is now approaching inferior conjunction, where it will pass between Earth and the Sun.

This close passage makes STEREO-A's X-band space beacon easily accessible to amateur-scale equipment, such as [Scott's] 66cm dish antenna. The dish is mounted on an alt-az telescope mount for tracking and sports a slew of focus equipment, like LNAs, filters, mixers and an Ettus B200 SDR. It's not a cheap setup, but compared to what's typically needed to listen to STEREO-A, it's a bargain. The process of demodulating and decoding the signals, however, was a little more complicated, requiring not only SatDump and custom code, but also a lot of patience. The pictures are worth the wait, though; [Scott] shares some amazing shots of our increasingly active Sun along with animations of recent sunspot activity.

If you're interested in getting in on the STEREO-A action, you better jump in - the satellite will only be in the vicinity for a few more months before heading off again for another pass behind the Sun.< /p>