Scenario 4 - State of Health

Shift Package

Date: Monday 8 November 2027, 1800 Local (0200Z Tuesday) Site: SANDSTORM (SS-01), transportable X-band EA site, high desert Operator on Console: You - contractor, second shift Crew Chief: MSgt Delgado (maintenance tent, radio on channel 2) Mission Direction: 9 EWS ops floor, callsign RAMPART

Primary terminal still down; 0205Z contact is ours again. Monitor is on the bird from last night, receiver 3 on 1625, modem 1 still on 1200. Chain cold.

TALON-2 came out of eclipse at 0120Z. The battery heater runs through eclipse exit and cycles off on its own at 20 °C. Rotterdam’s note says it did not last time and they are watching it. So watch it.

Command stack has the TCS heater commands loaded. Do not send anything you cannot verify on the panel.

• Delgado (turnover, 1745)

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TALON-2 Reference

Signal	RF (MHz)	LO (MHz)	IF (MHz)	Notes
TT&C uplink	8,200	7,000 (BUC, low-side)	1,200	H-pol; modem 1 already tuned
Telemetry / beacon downlink	7,300	8,925 (LNB, high-side)	1,625	V-pol; receiver 3, monitor chain
Contact window	-	-	-	T+5:00 to T+40:00 mission elapsed

Transient or Trend

Two kinds of thing move on a telemetry panel, and the whole shift is telling them apart.

	Transient	Trend
What it looks like	A channel departs and returns on its own	A channel departs and keeps going
Cause	Usually none visible; the spacecraft absorbed something	Usually visible in the channel next to it
Rate to harm	Never gets there	Reaches a limit inside the window
What you do	Log the time and the peak; it becomes a point in a long-term trend	Name it, call it, command it, verify it

Tonight’s transient: reaction wheel 1 to ~5200 rpm for a minute at T+4:00 - a momentum bump, unloaded on its own. Tonight’s trend: battery temperature climbing about three degrees a minute from T+7:00 with heater state ON beside it, forty minutes after eclipse exit. At that rate the battery is at the 40 °C red limit inside three minutes of the yellow crossing.

Caution

A state-of-health call that names the channel is a call somebody can act on. Degraded - battery temperature in yellow and climbing, heater stuck ON, commanding TCS-HTR-OFF is a call. One channel in yellow is not a degraded bird is not; nor is putting the payload to safe mode to protect a battery that a heater command protects just as well.

Command, Then Verify

Step	Where	What you see
HPA up, modem 1 keyed	TX Chain	Chain ready inside the window
TCS-HTR-OFF	TT&C console	ACK - receipt, not execution
Heater state	Telemetry tab	OFF on the next frame - the command executed
Battery temperature	Telemetry tab	Turns over and comes back inside limits over the next few minutes - the command fixed what you sent it for

A command is verified twice: the direct effect (the state it was meant to change) and the reason you sent it (the trend it was meant to stop). Log both times. Then chain cold before the log entry.

Note

The heater still needs an engineer. That is the anomaly report to RAMPART, not the contact log. The log carries what the panel said and when.

TALON-2 Contact Log 2027-313-01

Section	Line
Contact	The transient with its time and peak; the trend with its rate and cause; the call; the command and its ACK; the verification, both halves; the chain state; the report raised