Recovering Iran’s NOUR 01 ‘Military Satellite’

Iran’s new military satellite, NOUR 01, most interesting fact may not be that it resembles a college engineering experiment but rather that it may have a connection to a Mexican military payload launched quietly from New Zealand last year.

It’s also with great pleasure that I can share Scott Chapman, K4KDR’s story of how he found Iran’s NOUR 01 [45529, 2020-024A] radio emissions and confirmed it was alive and well in orbit and noted a twist to the story in a brief interview we had.

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A Brief Look at LES-5’s Telemetry Format

It’s not exactly every day that you get the chance to work with any data, let alone telemetry data from a 50-year-old satellite. However, thanks to Scott’s observations of LES-5 and subsequent investigation into its telemetry beacon, the opportunity arose. Based partly on the work of others, as well as what I’ve managed to glean from the technical documentation that has been gathered, I’d like to explain my process for processing data from LES-5.

LES-5 – Hacking the Telemetry Beacon?

LES-5 was recovered on March 24, 2020.  Since then I have completed a fair amount of research on the spacecraft and collected a number of published papers on the results of the experimental mission.  From those papers, I will lay out some possible methods to analyse the decoded telemetry from LES-5 such that we may be able to determine if the command receiver is still active.