Mini-Satellites Link Students with Future

by Annette Trinity-Stevens

1/10/01 BOZEMAN--It's hard to picture such diminutive objects in the cold and uncaring environment of outer space. But later this year, four-inch cubes like the one sitting on Dave Klumpar's desk will ride a Russian rocket into orbit and get kicked into space.

There, the cube satellites, called CubeSats, will function like real spacecraft by collecting data for days, weeks, or even months. "I would consider a lifetime of a few months to be a major success," said Klumpar, a research professor of physics at Montana State University-Bozeman. Klumpar is in charge of MSU’s new Space Science and Engineering Laboratory, where students have begun working on an MSU CubeSat they plan to have ready for launch in November 2001.

Weighing just over two pounds, the miniature satellite must have its own power supply and a two-way communications system. It will have to orient itself properly in space and maintain the correct temperature. And, ideally, it will collect meaningful information about the Earth’s space environment.

In fact, Klumpar envisions a network of MSU CubeSats in space one day taking measurements of the northern lights (aurora borealis), for example. Other universities have talked about sending a flotilla of CubeSats to Mars.

"It's like a little robot in a four-inch cube that can go out into the hazardous environment of space and survive for a few months," said Klumpar.

"If it can return a beep, that’s great," said MSU research professor of physics and one-time astronaut Loren Acton.
It was Acton's idea to create a lab for students to get hands-on experience designing and building inexpensive space hardware.

With the current generation of space engineers nearing retirement, there's going to be a real need for students with technical, presentation, teamwork and problem-solving skills, he said.

"We are virtually in a crisis stage in handing on the baton on space technology at a time when our space involvement is actually growing," Klumpar agreed."There’s an entire space industry that’s crying for space engineers."

The lab's budget--estimated at about $3 million a year--will be covered by grant dollars. The lab has initial funding from the Montana Space Grant Consortium and NASA EPSCoR.

" (The lab) will broaden our students' skills in just the directions desired by industry and national laboratories," said physics department head John Hermanson.

Similar space science labs exist in a few of the more populous western states, such as Utah, Colorado, and California, but not elsewhere in Montana or in nearby states, he said.

With the launch date less than a year away, the students will have to hustle to have their satellite ready in time. Several universities and independent teams, including a ham radio group in Washington, D.C., are already building their mini satellites.

A private launch provider in Ogden, Utah, will bundle about 15 CubeSats, including MSU's, into launch tubes once a year and deliver them to a launch site in Kazakhstan. The tubes will get bolted on as a secondary payload to a larger mission, which pays most of the launch cost. Once in space, the tubes will open and a spring will kick the cubes into space at the right time.

"The cost to us is $30,000," said Klumpar, a fraction of normal launch costs that range between $100,000 and $150,000 a kilogram. So if MSU's spacecraft doesn't beep from space, the loss is minimal, Klumpar said.

"But you really don't even lose that, because the students learned throughout the process," he said. "They met 95 percent of the objectives just getting to that point."

The lab is open to all undergraduate and graduate students, Klumpar said, but he expects physics, computer science, and electrical and mechanical engineering majors to be especially interested. So far, four students are working on the first CubeSat in the university’s Engineering/Physical Sciences Building.

"The desire to learn and the will to accomplish something far outstrips capability or experience," Klumpar said. "If a person has never seen a satellite and has never touched a soldering iron, in a day we can teach them to solder. If the student wants to learn, that's the biggest prerequisite."