The Auburn Student Space Program has received a grant for $894,000 from the National Science Foundation to design, build and test two CubeSat satellites.
The idea began when J-M Wersinger, director of the Auburn University Student Space Program, was working with Michael Briggs, assistant director and principal research scientist at the University of
Wersinger said they had been talking about doing joint work on CubeSat satellites, which are miniature satellites for space research, because Briggs had been doing work on a big satellite at UAH.
Briggs saw gamma rays, which have the most energy of all the waves on the electromagnetic spectrum, coming from Earth in the gamma-ray observatory at UAH, according to Wersinger. Gamma rays can kill living cells, which is why they are used for medical purposes to kill cancer cells, according to NASA.
Rather than have one satellite, using multiple CubeSat satellites will give more than one point to make a measurement, according to Wersinger.
Wersinger said the idea is to use these CubeSat satellites to track the gamma rays coming from Earth "because they’re much cheaper, you can build them much faster. You can have students build them, and they use the latest technology."
Briggs and Wersinger submitted a proposal for the grant, but realized they had an issue with the data, according to Wersinger. So they reached out to Mike Fogle, assistant professor for the Auburn University physics department, who "came in and resolved it," Wersinger said.
"If we could fly something like this, which we can develop in the span of three years versus a decade or more for a big satellite, it’s much more
The CubeSat satellites take approximately 90 minutes to make a complete orbit around the Earth, according to Wersinger. They can be accessed almost anywhere depending on their orbit around the Earth, according to Fogle.
"With CubeSats, we can build many of them, hundreds [of them], and cover Earth," Fogle said. "It's about the cost of one big satellite. And so you distribute them everywhere on Earth and you basically could look at many places at Earth simultaneously and then track them around."
CubeSats have multiple
CubeSats typically come in sizes of 1U, or 10 centimeters on one side, but the size of the satellites Auburn students will work with are 6U, according to Fogle.
"It’ll be about the size of a shoebox," Fogle said. "OK, it'll be a heavy shoebox. [It will] probably be somewhere between 10 and 12 kilograms."
While not part of the project, Fogle said he hopes to work on a hyperspectral sensor for the CubeSats in the future.
"It’s not a part of this mission that we’re funded to do," Fogle said. "But we’re always looking to build the program."
A hyperspectral sensor collects images of a scene "in tens to hundreds of narrow spectral bands nearly simultaneously," according to the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society.
"The idea we had was you could put a camera [on the satellite] ... but you can’t really tell a lot of what’s going on with just red, green, blue wavelengths," Fogle said. "What if instead of three, we had 100 wavelengths? And we could see from the UV [Ultraviolet] all the way up to the IR [Infrared]?"
With this technology, students will be able to "start to see things that you couldn't see with the eye" from space, like the difference "between Astroturf and regular turf on a football field," according to Fogle. Companies could use the technology to see if an oil spill occurred in a region that had oil platforms, according to Fogle.
Once the CubeSats "engineering model," or the test model that stays on the ground, has gone through several tests to find the "weak spots," two flight models will be built and then submitted to a launch service provider like NASA, according to Wersinger.
"We [will] send it to the launch service provider, [and] they put it in a rocket," Wersinger said. "And then you pray."
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