Elektro-L2 · 1693 MHz · Russia

Reading a satellite's radiation monitor

Elektro is a Russian weather satellite. Besides cameras it carries a sensor that counts electrons and protons in space and beams the readings down continuously. Nobody had published what those bytes mean. We worked it out from the raw radio.

What we did

Locked the frames, found the built-in checksum (verifies on 100% of frames), and read the onboard clock, which proved the byte layout was right.
Mapped each byte to an electron or proton energy band and its encoding.
Checked the result against Moscow State University's published readings for the same satellite.

12.5 hours of telemetry frames drawn as an image, with horizontal bands where the instruments report. — What the raw telemetry looks like: 12.5 hours drawn as an image, each column one second, each row one byte. The bands are the instruments talking.

Our decoded electron flux above 3 MeV overlaps the official published curve through a radiation-belt event. — The test: high-energy electrons during a radiation-belt event. Our decode from the radio (blue) sits on top of the official published curve (amber).

Six panels comparing decoded channels against published values, all tracking closely. — And it holds across all six channels, two instruments: decoded against published over the full recording.

The frame anatomy, if you want the bytes

Diagram of the 224-byte frame and the 14-byte detector record with each byte's channel assignment. — The recovered 224-byte frame and one 14-byte detector record, byte by byte.

Where it stands

L2 is done and validated. The sibling satellite Elektro-L5 uses the same band, and we now decode it too, off our own dish: the first frames we have both received and read ourselves. That work has its own page.

Recording (L2): Aweeri, shared with the community. Reference: SINP, Moscow State University. Frames: SatDump. Byte-level decode, validation, and the L5 capture: this project.