UCI hopes to image Earth with tissue-box-sized satellite
February 29th, 2008, 3:00 am · Post a Comment · posted by grobbins
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A former UC Irvine researcher has flown in space. So have scientific instruments developed on campus. Will a satellite be the next thing to go up?
It’s starting to look that way.
The 20 or so students on the UCISAT-1 team have built the basic parts of a 2.2-pound satellite that features a cell phone like camera designed to photograph clouds and countries. They’ve also booked the satellite – which is about the size of a tissue box – on the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which will soar into space next year from India. And the students have created a mission control center to track it.
But a hurdle remains, and it’s not insignificant. The UCISAT-1 team needs to raise $75,000 for launch-related costs. Nothing gets sent into space for free. And that’s a lot of scratch for students who live on pizza and Starbucks coffee.
Team leader Matt Bennett of Laguna Hills is optimistic, saying “We’re all space nuts on the UCISAT Team, and we’re looking for people who share our excitement for space and want to help us get into orbit with a donation toward the launch.”
The UCISAT-1 team is hoping to get bankrolled based on its record, which began about four years ago.
“When we first started,” says Bennett, “we were designing and building the prototype components out of our garages! Now we have our own laboratory and access to space environment testing facilities. Using these resources, the UCISAT team has designed, built, and successfully tested all spacecraft subsystems individually at this time of writing …
“While the size of UCISAT-1 might make you think that it is significantly easier to design and build than a typical commercial satellite, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Designing components to fit in such a small volume with the 1-kilogram mass constraint is an intricate task involving mass trade-offs and precise board-to-board interfacing.
“Imagine trying to stuff your cell phone, laptop computer, and digital camera into a Kleenex box. We need the same capabilities of those devices and more on our spacecraft. Plus, all of them need to survive the vacuum of space, the large temperature fluctuations of each orbit, galactic cosmic rays that threaten to burn out our computer components, and the plasma belts that could fry our distribution system.
“No one is getting paid to put UCISAT-1 together – we do it because it’s fun. Nothing is more motivating to us than the thought of sitting at our ground station a year from now and receiving the first images from a satellite we built as it orbits overhead. There’s no doubt in my mind that this team will make that dream a reality.”
