ABOUT
HERON Mk. II (High frequency Educational Radio communications On a Nanosatellite) is an amateur radio cubesat designed by the University of Toronto Aerospace Team (UTAT).
Since 2017, HERON has been under development, undergoing changes in mission scope, surviving regulatory hurdles, and providing aerospace design opportunities to many University of Toronto undergrads.
HERON has a mission lifespan of 1 year, supporting querying operations in the UHF amateur band.
LAUNCH
HERON is scheduled to launch in November 2023 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on the Transporter 9 rideshare mission.
00:00:00:00It will be in a sun-synchronous, low earth orbit at an altitude of 550km and an orbit inclination of 97 degrees.
After deployment, HERON will passively detumble using permanent magnets mounted inside the chassis of the spacecraft.
OPERATIONS
Once operational, HERON acts as a terminal node on the UHF band, available to amateur radio operators across the world.
HERON is ideal for testing transmission functionality and determining power output on new UHF groundstations, or providing operations experience to student teams
Interested in talking to HERON? Our comms guide can be found here.
GROUNDSTATION
UTAT operates a high-gain UHF groundstation designed for communicating with HERON.
The groundstation is installed on the rooftop of the Bahen Centre on the UofT campus in downtown Toronto.
The design of the groundstation is available here and the current status will be publicly available at a later date.
