Recording of Europa Clipper X-band telemetry with the Allen Telescope Array shortly after launch

This dataset contains an IQ recording of the X-band 8424.3 MHz telemetry signal from the Europa Clipper spacecraft done with the Allen Telescope Array starting 1 hour and 30 minutes after launch. Antenna 1a from the ATA was used in dual linear polarization (X and Y polarizations).

The hardware configuration was as follows: the antenna was connected to RFCB LO d, which was tuned to a frequency of 8424.5 MHz and used an output IF of 512 MHz. A USRP N321 digitized both polarizations of each antenna. The USRP used an external 10 MHz reference and PPS coming from the observatory distribution system, and LO sharing was set up among the two channels. The IQ sample rate of the USRP was 6.144 Msps, and a GNU Radio flowgraph was used to record IQ data to disk. The GNU Radio flowgraph stored the IQ data for each channel as 16-bin integers in the GNU Radio metatata file format, with detached headers.

After recording, the data was downsampled to 96 ksps centered around 8424.3 MHz and formatted using SigMF with the script do_sigmf.py. This reduced bandwidth is sufficient to decode the low data rate (2 kbps) telemetry signal. In addition to this signal, there are sequential ranging tones throughout much of the recording, but they are outside the 96 kHz bandwidth contained in this dataset.