LeonNov 19
Daniel Estévez
New blog post: Decoding ESCAPADE. Here I decode a recording of the ESCAPADE spacecraft that I did with an Allen Telescope Array antenna the day after they were launched. The modulation is PCM/PSK/PM with rate=1/2 Turbo code. The telemetry uses CCSDS TM frames and Space Packets. The telemetry packets contain many interesting strings with log messages, which appear to be generated by a Linux system running Rocket Lab's MAX flight software. Read more: https://destevez.net/2025/11/decoding-escapade/
Nov 19 at 9:55pmWeb
Show threadpistonminerNov 20

@destevez Awesome as always! I was really interested by the strings in the telemetry and did a tiny bit of extra reversing based on your decoded frames to dump the logs readably, in order. They're transmitted in APID 520. There's also a bunch of files downlinked in APID 740, corresponding to the files mentioned in the debug logs.

https://github.com/PistonMiner/escapade-reversing

The .mtc files themselves look like they're stored telemetry in the same format as the downlink but without the space packet framing.

Show threadpistonminerNov 20

@destevez Incidentally after reversing it I also found this documentation page which appears quite useful. In particular the nested framing inside the space packets appears to match this page: https://max.rocketlabusa.com/docs#MAX/Command%20and%20Telemetry/Framing/Simple%20Frame.md

I think APID 740 also loosely matches what's here, though not exactly serialized like this:
https://max.rocketlabusa.com/docs#MAX/Source%20Code/File/struct-CFileDownloadMgr--SSetupTlm.md
https://max.rocketlabusa.com/docs#MAX/Source%20Code/File/struct-CFileDownloadMgr--SDataTlm.md

Perhaps some of the other structures ending in *Tlm might show up in some form in other APIDs, but that's just a wild guess...

Docs - ASI