2 April 2026 – Club Meeting Presentation
— Thursday night, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
This free speaker presentation will be offered in-person at the
UNC-Asheville Reuter Center and virtually online. Registration is not required; use this Zoom link to watch the presentation remotely.
Although parking is free for this event at the UNC-Asheville Reuter Center, you must register your vehicle with a “Visitor 5pm – 6am” permit type at this link. Once registration is complete, visitors will not need to print or display a permit; the system utilizes camera-based License Plate Recognition technology. All vehicles must park front-end in, so that the license plate is visible.
An Astronomy Guest Speaker Series Event – a collaboration of the Astronomy Club of Asheville and UNC-Asheville
Tracking Artemis II’s Orion Spacecraft
– presented by
Timothy DeLisle,
Director of Software Engineering at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
The upcoming Artemis II mission will send astronauts around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era. NASA has selected the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) as one of a small number of organizations worldwide that will passively track the Orion spacecraft during its roughly 10-day journey. Using our radio telescopes and communications equipment, PARI will receive some of Orion’s transmissions and measure Doppler shift in the signal to help track the spacecraft’s trajectory. This data will help NASA assess the tracking capabilities of aerospace organizations worldwide.
In this talk, we’ll explore PARI’s role in supporting Artemis II, some of the preparations we’ve made for the mission, and a peek into PARI’s past from when the site was a NASA ground station. Along the way, we’ll take a look at some of the techniques used in space communication. What is Doppler shift and why is it valuable for spacecraft tracking? How do ground stations receive signals from spacecraft across hundreds of thousands of miles? And, what is radio modulation, the technique used to encode data, voice, and telemetry onto radio waves traveling through space?