“Communicating with a Satellite” — Hands-On Workshops with a Real Ground Station at the NAUKA 0+ Festival in Minsk

Imagine this: in front of you is a 1.8-meter-diameter parabolic antenna, and 36,000 kilometers above Earth there is a weather satellite that is photographing our hemisphere right now. To see that image, you need to point the antenna at the satellite manually.

On September 5–6, the Central Botanical Garden of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus will host the Science Festival, the country’s largest popular science event. As part of the festival, activities from the НАУКА 0+ project will take place. This year’s theme is “Your Space Universe,” dedicated to the anniversary of the first human spaceflight.

At the festival, we will set up two working stations where schoolchildren will work not with simulations or pre-prepared images, but with a real signal from space. Everyone will have the opportunity to go through the full process of working with a spacecraft — from programming its actions to receiving the result on Earth.

🌍 Workshop: “Receiving Images from the Elektro-L No. 3 Weather Satellite”

Participants will recreate a real communications session: they will locate a geostationary satellite in the sky, manually point the antenna toward it, acquire its telemetry beacon, and use the signal stability to confirm that the antenna is precisely aligned. Then they will wait for the scheduled transmission and receive an actual image of Earth using ground-based equipment. Transmission times: 9:00, 15:00, and 18:00 Moscow time.

Workshop program:

⭐️ introduction to the ground station

⭐️ determining the satellite’s position and pointing the antenna

⭐️ locating the beacon and confirming the alignment

⭐️ receiving and processing the satellite image

🛰 Workshop: “Receiving a Photograph from a Satellite Engineering Model via Radio Link”

Participants will have access to an engineering model of a satellite equipped with an onboard computer, radio system, and camera. It can only be controlled remotely via radio, just like a real spacecraft.

The task is to establish communication, check the spacecraft’s readiness, and create a command sequence: a series of commands that will instruct the satellite to turn on its camera, take a photograph, and prepare the file for transmission. The commands are sent to the spacecraft, execution is monitored through telemetry, and the image is transmitted to Earth in packets and reconstructed on a computer.

Workshop program:

➡️ introduction to the satellite engineering model

➡️ establishing a radio link and receiving telemetry

➡️ developing an algorithm and creating the command sequence

➡️ uploading commands to the satellite and monitoring execution

➡️ receiving data packets and reconstructing the image

The workshops will be led by:

⭐️ Georgy Antonyuk — PhD student at the Faculty of Physics of Lomonosov Moscow State University and junior researcher at the MSU Research Institute of Nuclear Physics’ Radiation Monitoring Laboratory.

⭐️ Dmitry Pashkov — chief designer of small spacecraft; lead designer at the Radiation Monitoring Laboratory of the D. V. Skobeltsyn Research Institute of Nuclear Physics at Lomonosov Moscow State University; supplementary education teacher; researcher at the Research Institute of Space Instrumentation and Radio-Electronic Systems at Southwestern State University (YuZGU); and head of the EFIR network of satellite ground stations.