Southampton engineers reach for the final frontier
Two postgraduate research students in Engineering are leading an ambitious University of Southampton student project to launch a satellite into space.
PhD students Aleksander Lidtke and Clemens Rumpf are behind the initiative to send CubeSat into orbit in 2017 to demonstrate the University of Southampton’s achievements in space technology and support its research into space debris. Since 2013, a total of 60 students from several disciplines and eight academic staff have worked with them on the multidisciplinary challenge known as the UoS³ (University of Southampton Small Satellite).
The ultra-light aluminium satellite, measuring 10cm x 10cm x 10 m and packed with components, is now being manufactured by the team and will hopefully be launched by a NASA rocket next year. The University has donated £20,000 towards the funding to build CubeSat and the UoS ³ team now is waiting to see if it is successful in gaining a slot to send it into space.
“Achieving a successful launch and actually getting a University-built Cubesat into orbit is our first objective. We also want to publicise the University’s involvement in research into space debris such as old satellites and rockets, tracking the UoS3 orbit from ground stations and collecting data to understand and predict exactly how objects in low Earth orbit fall towards our planet ” says Alek. “It is a fantastic project and we are excited at how it is all coming together after a lot of hard work.”
Alek and Clemens first became seriously interested in space technology during their MEng degrees; Alek took Aeronautics and Astronautics at Southampton and Clemens studied at TU Braunsweig in Germany and worked at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands before they met up at Southampton. Now they have brought together students from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Physics and even Winchester School of Art , along with the Southampton University Space Flight Society and the Southampton University Wireless Society. The different student groups design and develop various parts of the satellite and ground station such as the communications hardware, the antennae, power management, attitude control and the on-board computer. They are using Southampton’s 3D printing technology and manufacturing centre to make some of the components, and masters students in Engineering and the Environment and ECS are also tackling part of the work in their Group Design Projects. Masters students from Physics are calibrating the instrumentation that the satellite will carry, which is crucial to applying its results to do meaningful science with the data.The team is spreading the word to the outside world through a website and social media and the art students are approaching the subject with a creative perspective.
CubeSat will be launched into a low orbit between 300-400 km above Earth, because the team does not want to add to the many thousands of items of space debris already in space. It will circle the planet once every 90 minutes for around a year before it falls to Earth and eventually burns up in the atmosphere.
University of Southampton academic researchers led by Dr Hugh Lewis have worldwide reputations for predicting space debris and asteroid orbits. Hugh advises on the subjects for the UK Space Agency at the United Nations and other international expert committees and appeared in a documentary on space debris linked to the Oscar-winning Hollywood movie Gravity. Also part of the team are fellow academics Dr Scott Walker in Engineering and the Environment and Professor Steve Gunn, Dr Alex Weddell and Dr Rob Maunder from ECS and Dr Robert Fear from Physics.
Find out more about the project on the CubeSat website or on Facebook