What does it take to obtain a small satellite built by students at the international space station so that it can be tested in orbit?
Eight years. Over 120 undergraduate students. Industry employees. And a lot of glue.
This fall, Alpha-cubeat is planned to be extended at the ISS. It is not the only student experience in space. The launch of the ISS, at the end of the summer, is a related project, sailing towards the stars, in which six light sails This could one day propel small spaceships via interstellar kingdoms will be tested in microgravity.
The two projects emerged from Cornell Spatial Systems Design Studio (SSDS), directed by PeakThe Stephen J. Fujikawa ’77 Astronautical Engineering Professor in Cornell Engineering.
“These spatial technology technology technology experiences do fundamental orbit research, raising new ideas beyond simple paper studies and proving that they work,” said Peck. “It is quite rare that a student can launch his senior project, but Cornell can be unique among American universities in the way we present students with revolutionary technological research as experiential learning.”
Cubesats are low -cost modular satellites the size of a shoe box, or smaller, which can be tailor -made to meet a multitude of technical requirements for different types of missions. Such a mission: the deployment of light sails, size sheets the size of a microprismatic retroreflective film poster which is folded by origami inside a deployer, then come out like a jack-in-box and float on distant planets or star systems. The sails can be equipped with satellites the size of a chip – aka “Chipsats– To transmit data to the earth.
THE Alpha-cubeat The concept was offered in 2016 by Isabel Dawson ’23, then second year student at ITHACA high school. After being inspired by a conference Peck gave to her school, she managed an IHS team to win a International Cubeat design competition. The team was associated with a group of Cornell students to transform this design into a functional satellite.
“They have become far enough,” said Joshua Umansky-Castro, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering, who joined the project in 2019. “But as you can see, they did not quite finish that year.”
As the years passed, several generations of engineering students who contributed to Alpha. As the pandemic struck, the original team had dispersed and the members decreased. Umansky-Castro ended up spending six months to rethink the circuits in his room.
“Meanwhile, I learned everything from scratch,” he said. “And when the campus has reopened, we started to rethink everything, operate the electronics, have a brand new chipsat designed. Even sail had to be modified.”
While Aumansky-Castro supervised hardware development, Lauren Greenhill ’24 managed the software. She rewritten the programming during her first -year winter holidays, then spent the next three and a half years by leading a team of students to have the source code tested and be ready for the flight.
Now that Alpha’s terrestrial time is almost increasing, Greenhill is surprised by the path traveled by the project.
“I had a robotics experience in high school, but it was really exciting to go to a real spacecraft and to do research that I really thought significant,” she said. “Alpha was the most important part of my Cornell experience.”
‘Wait a second, I cannot leave the laboratory’
Students have had a lot of aid along the way, including long -standing mentorship of the Silicon Valley Andrew Filo engineers, whose contributions include the design of light sail, and Alex Burke, which shared best practices for the design of circuits and software. The Avery-Dennison Corporation provided the light sailing equipment, and the Houston-based travel space (formerly Nanoracks) helped facilitate the NASA safety approvals necessary for the technology to fly aboard the space station.
In March, Alpha was packed and delivered after a one -month ardued push so that everything was finished in time. The final work on alpha material was particularly exhausting.
“It was really crazy,” said Umansky-Castro. “There was one point that I started to calculate the number of hours I had left and I realized, wait a second, I cannot leave the laboratory. So, from Sunday to Friday, I never left. I kept working, one step at a time, making power naps while Grue was dried.
Stress is not over. When astronauts release Alpha in space, the student team will try to communicate with satellite via a connection of the Iridium modem because it periodically sends basic spatial health data on Earth. Alpha will also perform some technical demonstrations, such as stabilization of the spin. After 24 hours, when Alpha is at a safety distance from the space station and the student team receives authorization from NASA, they will send a series of three orders and order the cubesat to deploy a light SSDS sail.
Then, the students will wait to receive readings of sensors which confirm the deployment, as well as the data of four chipsats which is installed on sail. These data will be relayed via a long -range low power technology collected by Tiny GS – Abbreviation of Tiny Ground Station – which is a network of open source global satellites which essentially allows thousands of backyard astronomers to listen to satellites.
“We will have all these listeners from around the world to try to hear these chipsats in a period of two days to see if they are alive and work,” said Umansky-Castro. “We are as prepared as possible, but there is still anxiety. I took years of my life to test this and to come to the point where it is ready for the flight. There is always this feeling of “Is it really ready?” Especially when it is in orbit.
After two days, the atmospheric trail will force Alpha and the slight navigation of the orbit and they burn at the start of the school year. However, if everything goes as planned, their mind will live in the data that students collect. The results can shed light on other projects in the SSDS pipeline, such as descendants, which will publish 100 chipsats at an altitude of 100 kilometers to better understand how the tiny satellites disperse as they fall. SSDS also develops chipsats for the lunar surface and surviving atmospheric input and possibly monitoring livestock.
Even after Alpha has been reduced to Cinders, Umansky-Castro will continue its involvement in the Chipsat design, as a postdoc or independent consultant.
“It was a dream to send something to space,” he said. “And I am so grateful to have this opportunity in Cornell to do it and share this experience with all these students who also want to do the same thing.”
“What is going on exactly there?”
Compared to the alpha cubeat, the development of Navigate to the stars was relatively fast. Verena Padres ’26, a mechanical and aerospace engineering student, worked in the Alpha integration test team in the first year, and in the fall of 2023, she became the project manager to navigate to the stars. Two years later, the sails and light deployers are ready for the launch and approved by NASA, a remarkable feat that testifies to the team effort, discipline, hard work and solid leadership, according to Umansky-Castro.
“I don’t think Verena never mentions it herself, but I will boast for her,” he said. “Most projects in the 20 years of our laboratory have taken years.”
Like Umansky-Castro, she and her team spent many late nights in the laboratory to make last minute adjustments before shipping light sails to their industry partner, Rhodium Scientific, in Houston in May. Six sails will be tested, as are two different deployers: one that imitates Alpha Cubesat, and one with a new design, perhaps more stable. Unlike traditional cubesates, these deployers use hard computers hard drives to turn and generate the angular moment necessary for deployment. Astronauts will set up a pair of video cameras to capture the one hour experience. Padres and his team expect to be in communication with astronauts during tests, in case of questions on procedures or equipment. Subsequently, students will receive video sequences and cubeat sensor data to examine and see what they can learn.
“What does the coming sail look like?” said Padres, a passionate space passionate who previously interned in the NASA jet propulsion laboratory. “If you understand better how light sail comes out, then you can understand what to do with it.”
The light sails came out of the laboratory, but Padres is not completely finished with them. Four days before the launch of the ISS, she and several teammates will fly away in Florida and will obtain one last moment with their equipment to carry out final tests, check the battery tension, tighten the screws and fix the sails.
For the moment, she is waiting and, like Umansky-Castro, face the preliminary assaults.
“It is not yet entirely,” said Padres, “but it’s certainly more fun moments than sitting there, trying to wait for dry epoxy at 11 pm”