Want to Learn How to Design and Build a Satellite?

Artist’s con­cep­tion of a 4″ x 4″ x 4″ Cube­Sat in Orbit

The Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico is look­ing for under­grad­u­ate stu­dents who are inter­ested in learn­ing to design, build and launch small satel­lites.  The Con­fig­urable Space Microsys­tems Inno­va­tions and Appli­ca­tions Cen­ter (COSMIAC) has a new grant from the Air Force Research Lab­o­ra­tory Uni­ver­sity Phillips Tech­nol­ogy Pro­gram to work with UNM and other uni­ver­si­ties to design, build and launch a small satel­lite in the next few years.

The uni­ver­si­ties involved include UNM, NMSU, NM Tech, NM High­lands, and Uni­ver­sity of Texas, El Paso.  Stu­dents from the var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ties will work on spe­cific parts of the Space Envi­ron­ment Test Sys­tems (SETS) Satellite.

Aca­d­e­mic Pro­grams & Design Ser­vices Direc­tor of COSMIAC Craig Kief says he is look­ing for stu­dents who will work with men­tors to design a Cube­Sat that will accom­plish sev­eral things.

• A proof of con­cept for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s SPA archi­tec­ture.  This will be the sec­ond COSMIAC Cube­Sat that will use off-the-shelf com­po­nents will uti­lize the SPA tech­nol­ogy with avail­able off-the shelf com­po­nents to inte­grate and opti­mize the var­i­ous func­tions of a satel­lite. COSMIAC is work­ing with AFRL to prove that small satel­lites can be con­structed to work reli­ably at a much cheaper cost than cur­rent tech­niques allow.

• Carry a series of Lang­muir Probes as part of an ongo­ing effort to mon­i­tor weather in the ionos­phere.  The Lang­muir Probes will deter­mine the elec­tron tem­per­a­ture, den­sity and the elec­tric poten­tial of the ionos­phere as SETS trav­els through it.

• The Wind Ion Neu­tral Com­pos­ite Suite (WINCS) is an instru­ment devel­oped by NASA, The Naval Research Lab­o­ra­tory and NASA’s God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter.  The instru­ment will record infor­ma­tion in the ionos­phere and ther­mos­phere.  Under tumul­tuous con­di­tions, the energy car­ried by the solar wind can heat up in the ther­mos­phere, which then expands and causes an atmos­pheric drag on orbit­ing space­craft.  That can make the craft return pre­ma­turely to Earth.  This instru­ment will work with oth­ers on the Cube­Sat to help sci­en­tists bet­ter under­stand the dynam­ics of the ionosphere.

• The craft will also have artic­u­lated solar pan­els that can pivot to face the sun with­out chang­ing the ori­en­ta­tion of the craft.  This is crit­i­cal since solar power is the only source of energy for the small (4”x8”x12”) spacecraft.

• The SETS will also have two soft­ware defined radios.  The data rates on the radios can be altered so that infor­ma­tion is sent to a receiver on earth very quickly when the space­craft is posi­tioned over­head where recep­tion is best, and sent at a much slower rate when the space­craft is posi­tioned in por­tions of the sky where data trans­mis­sion is more dif­fi­cult.  SETS will also be able to com­mu­ni­cate with other NASA space­craft while in orbit.

• SETS will carry a dosime­ter to mea­sure radi­a­tion lev­els as it trav­els through the ionosphere.

Design­ing and build­ing the Cube­Sat wil take sev­eral semes­ters so Kief says they are par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in attract­ing under­grad­u­ate stu­dents who can stay with the pro­gram from the begin­ning.  Stu­dents inter­ested in becom­ing part of the pro­gram can look for the upcom­ing course on small space­craft design that will be offer by Asal Naseri in Elec­tri­cal and Com­puter Engi­neer­ing in spring 2012.

This joint effort is now in the orga­ni­za­tional stage.  For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact Cosmiac’s Craig Kief at craig.kief@cosmiac.org or Chris­tos Christodoulou at christos@ece.unm.edu

Media con­tact: Karen Went­worth (505) 277‑5627; kwent2@unm.edu