Category Archives: Amateur/Student Satellite

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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Amateur/Student Satellite, Education, Satellite Watching

Russian student satellite will shine bright in the night sky

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A Russian student satellite was recently launched (along with 72 other satellites) into low earth orbit (LEO). Mayak is Russia’s first crowdfunded satellite project. The primary goal is to demonstrate that a small satellite can be de-orbited passively by deploying a large form that greatly increases the drag of the spacecraft as it passes through the extremely thin upper atmosphere in LEO.

Mayak, which is about the size of a loaf of bread (10cm x 10cm x 34 cm),  will inflate a tetrahedron-shaped form covered in reflective sheets. This will not only increase its drag but will also make it very bright in the night sky: Almost as Bright as the Moon? New Satellite Might Light Up the Sky – Sky & Telescope.

Each surface is four square meters on a side and should be readily visible from the ground on a twilight pass. In fact, the team claims, Mayak will be the “brightest shooting star” once unfurled, almost as bright as the full Moon at magnitude –10. Mayak could be visible in bright twilight and perhaps even during daytime passes as well.

The satellite tracking website Heavens-Above has created a Mayak tracking tool that will tell you when Mayak will pass over your location.

The plan is to fly Mayak in a stabilized mode for the first four weeks, then set it tumbling on all three axes, setting off a brilliant twinkling pattern. The team’s site mentions using brightness estimations from Mayak to gather information about air density at high altitude and to calibrate brightness estimations for future satellites.

The reflector will also speed up reentry once deployed, utilizing both solar wind pressure and atmospheric drag. Such devices may become a standard feature on future satellites, enabling them to de-orbit shortly after their mission ends rather than adding to the growing tally of space junk in low-Earth orbit. Nanosail-D2 tested a similar technology in 2011, and another mission recently dispatched from the International Space Station, InflateSail, is currently testing the same method.

The University of Toronto’s CanX-7  satellite, launched last September, deployed a drag sail in May and it quickly demonstrated its de-orbiting effect.

Here is a video of the launch of the Soyuz rocket that  put the 73 satellites into orbit:

 

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Amateur/Student Satellite, Software, Space Systems

Video: TMRO Orbit 10.23 – “KubOS, An Operating System for CubeSats”

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Here is the latest TMRO.tv show: KubOS, An Operating System for CubeSats – Orbit 10.23 – TMRO

Marshall Culpepper the CEO & Co-founder of KubOS joins us to talk about their operating system for CubeSats and how they are helping to spur the growth of the CubeSat market.

In Space News:

NICER is deployed on the International Space Station
Tianzhou-1 conducts undocking and redocking at Tiangong-2
Updated Kepler catalog yields 219 more planets
14 Year Old Satellite is out of control
ESA selects LISA for gravity wave observatory in space

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