Shooting for the stars:UK students, NASA work on satellite

By Kristin Sherrard

When NASA launches a satellite into space next year, it will be another small step for man, but one giant leap for UK.

UK students are helping launch Kentucky’s first orbital satellite for a NASA mission. The satellite, KySat-1, is expected to launch in mid-2009, said KySat Team Leader Tyler Doering, a second-year graduate student in electrical and computer engineering.

“Being selected for the NASA launch is an important step for us,” said James Lumpp, the UK faculty adviser and engineering lead on the project. “It shows the program is of interest to NASA, and it’s really pretty exciting.”

KySat is the satellite component of the Kentucky Space program, which began in June 2006. Kentucky Space is a non-profit organization that consists of six colleges and universities in Kentucky and public and private organizations that are working to design and lead innovative space missions within realistic budgets and objectives, according to their Web site.

“Their motivation is getting technology and keeping technology in Kentucky,” Doering said.

The satellite will help NASA in their operations because the smaller satellites can perform riskier missions that use less time and money in preparation costs, Doering said. Small satellite missions can be turned around in less than one year and conducted for less than $1 million, he said.

The satellite is a 10-square-centimeter cube and made up of two main components: the bus and the payload. The bus is the main computer and power supply for the satellite. It also contains a low-bandwidth radio used to communicate with the team on the ground. All the students who have worked for the program have contributed to the design of the bus, said Lumpp, who is also a UK electrical and computer engineering professor.

The payload is a scientific instrument attached to the satellite. For KySat-1, it is a small digital camera used to take pictures from orbit and an experimental high-bandwidth communications radio.

Currently, the students are concentrating on environmental testing. The satellite must be able to endure the severe vibrations from the rocket launch, as well as the harsh weather extremes of the space environment, Lumpp said. The students are also establishing testing facilities and contributing in large part to the design of the hardware, software, computer systems, interfaces and ground station software.

“The experience we get here puts us on the top-notch for aerospace recruiters,” Doering said.
Samir Rawashdeh, a second-year electrical engineering graduate student, wanted to work for KySat because he was looking for a challenging project.

“(I wanted) to work on something grand, work in a big group and gain experience actually applying your theory to actual applications,” said Rawashdeh.

Because five other schools work on the satellite, a lot of e-mails are exchanged and weekly teleconferences are held to make sure that everyone is working together, Lumpp said.
“We try to get the students from across the state together as much as we can, every few months,” he said.
Biweekly teleconferences are also held with NASA in preparation for the mission, Lumpp said.
In addition to preparing the satellite for launch, the KySat team focuses on outreach to K-12 students across the state.

For the United States to stay competitive in the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and math – students have to be interested in pursuing those fields early on, Lumpp said.

“By the time they hit junior high, high school, if they’ve decided that math is boring or science is boring, we’ve lost them,” Lumpp said. “We want to catch them as early as we can in school and kind of use KySat as an example of the interesting things you can do.”

After the satellite is launched, they will be able to upload photos taken by the satellite and print them off for the students to take home with them. They can also go out on the playground and point a handheld radio antenna toward the satellite and listen to the radio beacons, Lumpp said.

“The person who walks on Mars, the person who is in mission control, all the engineers and scientists that are going make that happen,” Lumpp said. “They are all in elementary school today and hopefully an elementary school in Kentucky.”

High school students will be able to use computers to command the satellite by hand. According to Lumpp, KySat put in a proposal to NASA to put a network of stations in middle and high schools across the state so that several outlets will be able to operate the satellite.

“I’d love to get young students to realize that there is aerospace in Kentucky… and not want to be doctors or lawyers, but be an engineer,” Doering said.

KySat is also looking for college students to get involved with the program, whether they are engineering or science majors or not. Lumpp said they are looking for marketing and business students to help with the Web site and education students to work on the curriculum materials used for the outreach program.

“We are in a new space race,” Lumpp said. “It’s an exciting time to be involved in space and aerospace, and it’s an important time if you want to keep up with things and stay competitive.”