Author(s): Barbara Warmbein
One hour and 34 minutes after the bright tail of the Kosmos 3M rocket disappeared from view, more than one hundred students are checking their watches nervously. The first signal from their satellite should arrive any minute. Barbara Warmbein, from the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, the…
In the mission’s ground-control centre in Aalborg, Denmark, students working as ‘mission control’ shift nervously in their chairs. The transformed university classroom is full of camera teams, cables have been secured to the floor with tape, and partitions display hastily pinned-up posters of the Student Space Exploration and Technology Initiative Express: SSETI Express. They don’t need fancy rows of monitors, buttons and levers or large screens along the wall, just a few tables, computers and a team of extremely excited students. Then, with a crackle and a beep, the radio comes on – SSETI Express is alive!
SSETI Express lift-off
Photograph courtesy of J. Page
The first few chapters of the story – describing how hundreds of European students designed, built, tested and launched their own satellite to experience life as an engineer first-hand – read like a fairy-tale. Twenty-three universities from 14 different countries had teams working on SSETI Express – the ‘fast track’ satellite conceived by students who had had enough of theory and wanted to know what it was really like to launch a satellite.
They teamed up with the Education Department of the European Space Agency (ESA), and within 18 months had achieved what normally takes three to four years and costs a lot more than the €100 000 that went into SSETI Express. ESA provided the launch on the Russian rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, and when the satellite blasted off on a crisp October morning in 2005 and sent its first signal back from orbit at a height of 690 kilometres, all signs pointed to a happy ending.
But that was where the fairy-tale ended and real life began. After a successful first day, contact to SSETI Express was lost: it could not recharge its batteries because of a failure in the electrical power system. The students tried to recover it – there was still a slight but significant chance. “Of course we are disappointed. But in a way this meets our educational objective,” says Neil Melville, Project Manager and System Engineer of SSETI Express. “We wanted to give students an idea of what it is like to launch a satellite, and troubleshooting is certainly an important part of it!”
The student-built satellite
in the cleanroom
Despite the disappointment of the power failure, Neil and the teams considered their mission a success. Two of the three miniature satellites on board SSETI Express were released, leading to some “stunningly perfect” results: the satellite passed over the observation point at exactly the planned orbit, and the timing of the first signal was exactly right. Ground control was able to talk to the satellite and it replied. Perhaps more importantly, the students learned useful and valuable lessons.
A day before the launch, the
team watches the rocket
being erected
The majority of the students were studying for a degree in engineering. But because a project like SSETI Express also needs a legal background, there was also a team of law students – and if students of journalism hadn’t set up a public relations team, you might never have heard of the project at all. Discipline was not an issue: “We were all doing it of our own free will, and of course we were all extremely enthusiastic about it, so it was very easy to control because we all wanted it to happen,” explains Neil.
Their next satellite, the European Student Earth Orbiter or ESEO, is scheduled for launch in 2008, and the more ambitious students want to go even further: they are looking at ways to build and launch a Moon orbiter.
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Review
This article reports on a very exciting satellite project planned and performed by university students. It proves that students can be directly involved in aerospace technology, and will encourage both teachers and students of secondary schools to develop or join similar projects. The main problems are highlighted, to enable others to benefit from the experience gained.
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