Category Archives: Amateur/Student Satellite

Amateur/Student Satellite, Education, Living in Space

Video: Cosmonauts throw student CubeSats into orbit during ISS spacewalk

On Wednesday, Russian flight engineers Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopyev made a spacewalk outside the International Space Station.  Their initial tasks included hurling four student-built smallsats into orbit: Spacewalkers toss nanosatellites into orbit, hook up bird migration monitor – Spaceflight Now

The spacewalkers’ first task was the deployment — by hand — of four CubeSats built by Russian students.

The cosmonauts carried with them two Tanyusha satellites, each about the size of a small toaster oven, built by students at Southwestern State University with demo payloads to study spacecraft autonomy technology and to measure the vacuum of space. Another pair of SiriusSat CubeSats, assembled by Russian schoolchildren and equipped with particle detectors, was also with the cosmonauts.

Prokopyev tossed the four nanosatellites into space by hand just outside the Pirs airlock, using a manual release method used on previous Russian spacewalks.

Here is a video of the hand-tossed orbital deployments plus views of the tiny satellites drifting away from the station:

Most of the rest of the nearly 8 hour long EVA involved installation of an antenna and related equipment for a German project to track animals wearing GPS transmitters:

Then the duo turned their attention to the installation of antennas and cables for a German-developed instrument package to track global animal movements. The equipment was placed outside the station’s Zvezda service module in a multi-step procedure that took a couple of hours longer than originally planned.

Called Icarus, the project aims to reveal changes in migratory routes, animal connections and other animal behavior. The antenna for Icarus was carried aloft in February, and a computer launched on a Russian Progress mission last year to help process the signals coming from tracking units tagged to animals on Earth.

“Icarus is a global collaboration of research scientists that are interested in life on the globe, and once we put together all the information on mobile animals, then we have a different and new understanding of life on Earth,” said Martin Wikelski, lead scientist on the Icarus project, director of the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology, and professor the University of Konstanz in Germany.

The Icarus project will start by tracking small animals, such as birds, bats and flying foxes, according to DLR, the German Aerospace Center. Tags fixed to the animals will transmit information on their migratory behavior — such as their GPS coordinates, acceleration and environmental data — up to a receiver on the space station.

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Amateur/Student Satellite, Living in Space, Space Systems

Video: Japan’s BIRDS project deploys satellites from ISS for countries new to space

The Japan space agency’s BIRDS project has launched university student-built CubeSats from the Kibo module on the International Space Station for several countries that have never before put spacecraft into orbit. The project is managed by the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech) and is known officially as the Joint Global Multi-Nation Birds Satellite project.

A view of the BIRDS-2 deployment as seen by German astronaut Alexander Gerst.

Birds-1 deployed scientific and technology demonstration CubeSats from Ghana, Mongolia, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Japan while BIRDS-2 deployed CubeSats for Bhutan, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

This video, narrated mostly in Japanese but with English subtitles, describes the Birds project and shows the two deployment events. An animation between 11:10 – 14:30 gives a clear depiction of how the ISS satellite deployment system works.

Birds-1:

Birds-2

Another image of the BIRDS-2 deployment from Alexander Gerst on Twitter.

A JAXA project apparently separate from BIRDS also deployed spacecraft for three countries that are newbies to orbital hardware:

The three BIRDS-2 cubesats head into orbit. Alexander Gerst on Twitter

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Amateur/Student Satellite, Education, Space Systems

Video: Small satellites from Costa Rico, Kenya & Turkey shot into orbit from the ISS

Last Friday evening (May 11th), CubeSats from Costa Rico, Kenya, and Turkey were deployed into low earth orbits from the Japanese Kibo module on the International Space Station. This video shows a recording of the live webcast of the event. The Irazu (Costa Rica) and 1KUNS-PF（Kenya) satellites can be seen being shot into orbit (with a spring loaded deployer) at around the 35:00 point and UBAKUSAT (Turkey) at around 45:00.

For more about the backgrounds of the three small satellite projects, see

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Amateur/Student Satellite, Education

Student satellite projects

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It’s becoming increasingly common for students in colleges as well as in grade schools and high schools to built small satellites and see them go into space before they graduate. Here is a story about one such project in Oregon: Student Satellite …. Radio | OPB

The Oregon Small Satellite Project is an ad hoc group of students and educators working on a nano-satellite or “cubesat” to hand off to NASA to launch into space next year. Andrew Greenberg is the faculty advisor for the Portland State Aerospace Society, the group heading up the project. He joins us to talk about the project and its mission.  

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The basic IU CubeSat is 10 cm to a side:

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Chinese students are also getting involved: China to launch first student satellite for scientific education – Xinhua | English.news.cn

China’s first nano-satellite with primary and middle school students involved in the development and building process will be launched into space Friday.

The satellite, named after late Premier Zhou Enlai, was sent from its production base in Huai’an Youth Comprehensive Development Base in east China’s Jiangsu Province to Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province Monday, where a CZ-11 solid fuel rocket is scheduled to put it into orbit Friday.

Twenty teenagers who participated in the development project accompanied the transport group to the launch center and will witness the lift-off.

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A smallsat built and operated by a student team in Colorado helped solve a mystery of the earth’s radiation belts: How A CU Student Satellite Solved A Major Space Mystery | Boulder, CO Patch

The CubeSat mission, called the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE), houses a small, energetic particle telescope to measure the flux of solar energetic protons and Earth’s radiation belt electrons. Launched in 2012, CSSWE has involved more than 65 CU Boulder students and was operated for more than two years from a ground station they built on the roof of a LASP building on campus.

The instrument on CSSWE, called the Relativistic, Electron and Proton Telescope integrated little experiment (REPTile), is a smaller version of REPT, twin instruments developed by a CU Boulder team led by LASP director and Nature paper co-author Daniel Baker that were launched on NASA’s 2012 Van Allen Probes mission.

“This is really a beautiful result and a big insight derived from a remarkably inexpensive student satellite, illustrating that good things can come in small packages,” said Baker. “It’s a major discovery that has been there all along, a demonstration that Yogi Berra was correct when he remarked ‘You can observe a lot just by looking.'”

“These results reveal, for the first time, how energetic charged particles in the near-Earth space environment are created,” said Irfan Azeem, a program director in the NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences.

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While not as challenging or time consuming as building a real satellite, this lesson plan on making a satellite model is nevertheless quite instructive for students: Build a Satellite Activity | NASA/JPL Edu.

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Amateur/Student Satellite, Contests and Games, Space Systems

Student CubeSat Structures Competition – National Space Society and EXOS Aerospace

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The National Space Society‘s Enterprise in Space, a “NewSpace education” initiative, and EXOS Aerospace are sponsoring the student CubeSat Structures Competition –

Experiments that fly in space need a structure to hold them. These structures can be of many shapes and sizes depending on the type of rocket that will take them to space. To mark the first steps of the collaboration between the National Space Society’s Enterprise In Space (EIS) program and EXOS Aerospace Systems and Technologies, Corp. and the initiative to send hundreds of student experiments into space, we are offering this worldwide search to find the perfect CubeSat structure! 

Whether you create your CubeSat using 3-D printing, innovative technologies, or new types of materials, you will have fun meeting the challenge of creating a lightweight, strong and easy to duplicate CubeSat. If your design is chosen in the semifinalist design challenge, you will be given the opportunity to build the structure and send it to EXOS for evaluation.

Applicants must be students 18 years or older. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 1, 2018.

More at CubeSat Structures Competition Opens Space Design to Students of the World – National Space Society Blog.

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