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Launch date set for 2nd MTU satellite

Photo provided by Troy Maust Jacob Knott and Elijah Newton, members of the Michigan Tech Aerospace Enterprise Team, hold their satellite, Stratus. NASA notified the team last week Stratus is set to launch in March 2021.

HOUGHTON — After three years of development, a nanosatellite built by Michigan Technological University students is in the final stages of preparation before being sent into orbit.

NASA has scheduled the satellite, Stratus, for launch from the International Space Station (ISS) in March 2021. The name comes from the satellite’s mission: studying the structure of clouds, the winds in the upper atmosphere, and how those winds move the clouds. It will get the images through a thermal infrared camera. The data will be used to improve weather models. 

“From the images taken by the camera, you can identify what pixels in the photo are cloud pixels and what are not cloud pixels,” said Brad King, Michigan Tech’s Henes Endowed Professor in Space Systems, who is an advisor to Tech’s Aerospace Enterprise team. 

The journey to space will take a different form than for most satellites, King said. In most cases, they are mounted on a rocket, which opens its nose cone once in space, kicking the satellite into orbit. Stratus will make the trip inside a cargo module launched to the ISS on a Falcon 9 rocket. Astronauts will unload the cargo — including Stratus, which will be taken to an airlock. A robot will grab the satellite and gently nudge it out, sending it into orbit. 

“That was the quickest way that NASA could get the spacecraft into orbit,” King said. “It was the easiest low-cost way to make it happen within a year or two.”

When the imaging data arrives, Tech students will download it and use it to calculate wind velocity maps. They will then share the data with NASA scientists at the Goddard Spaceflight Center.

It is a completely undergraduate project, King said, with more than 100 students from various disciplines working on it at any given time. Many work on it their entire time at Tech.

In 2016, NASA selected Tech’s proposal as one of a few to receive funding to design satellites after a nationwide competition.  

Up front, there is a lot of design work, as the team looks at what the spacecraft needs to do, said Matthew Sietsema, the chief engineer for Michigan Tech Aerospace Enterprise. There are also a series of project checkpoints with NASA, including the critical design review, which Stratus passed in December. 

Sietsema has been with the project for about two-and-a-half years. He joined after seeing a display on campus, then going to an informational session. 

After the tunnel vision that can come from working intently on a project for so long, the announcement of the launch helps them take a step back to see what they have accomplished so far, Sietsema said. 

“This is the ultimate validation that we were doing what we were supposed to do,” he said. “It’s an indication that we’re headed in the right direction.”

NASA notified the team of the launch date last week. Ahead of that, there’s a testing list “that seems to be a mile long,” King said. 

The team will run the satellite through a full day of operations, where they will monitor functions and look for hardware and software errors. Once they work out any bugs, they will do environmental testing, such as extreme vibration and hot and cold thermal cycles to gauge its readiness for space. After another round of testing to make sure it was not damaged in the environmental testing, Stratus will head to Cape Canaveral. 

Testing has hit a snag over the past month, as lab spaces at the university have been shut down as part of the COVID-19 closure. 

“We’re waiting for that to clear up so we can jump back in and keep testing,” Sietsema said. 

Tech’s first satellite, the Oculus-ASR, was launched from Cape Canaveral in June 2019. It serves as an imaging calibration target for ground-based observatories. At 50-by-50-by-80 centimeters, it was also a nanosatellite. Stratus is even smaller, measuring 10-by-10-by-30-centimeters and weighing only 4.4 kilograms.

Tech’s third satellite is already being worked on. Auris, which is being built for the Air Force Research Laboratory, will be used to listen to radio emissions from other satellites to make sure they comply with transmission regulations. The satellite has cleared system concept review, but still has more design reviews ahead. 

“Most likely, that satellite is two to three years away,” King said.

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