![]() ![]() “If you just touch one with your fingernail, it breaks.” “The problem is these are very, very delicate,” Lalwani said. The manufacturer trims large solar cells to size, and these cutoffs are sold to the team for only $4 a cell. They’re made from scrap gallium arsenide solar cells. The solar panels were a major challenge, says Anand Lalwani, a BSE member who currently leads the satellite’s power team. They built their own solar panels, developed their own electronics and wrote the computer code that makes it all work. They milled the satellite’s chassis from a single block of aluminum. That meant building many of the spacecraft’s parts and critical systems themselves. As part of their mission to demonstrate the accessibility of space, the Brown team wanted to build a satellite that could be reproduced for less than $5,000. But that would cost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s possible to piece together a CubeSat using commercially available satellite parts. Ever since, the group has been wrestling with the myriad challenges involved in building a satellite from scratch. They were a bit stunned when they were selected for a launch. The group, then just a handful of students (its ranks have since swelled to more than 80 students), started working up some designs, and eventually the group applied to NASA for space on a rocket. student at Brown, first got the idea along with a few classmates to try to build and launch a satellite. Max Monn, then an undergraduate and now a Ph.D. The satellite team, now dubbed Brown Space Engineering (BSE), started in 2012. The Brown community will have a chance to see EQUiSat, and bid it farewell before its journey to space on Friday, March 16, when it will be on display in the Hazeltine Commons in the Engineering Research Center. EQUiSat should be in orbit anywhere from one to two years before its orbit decays and it burns up in the atmosphere. Brown undergraduates will develop K-12 curricula around the satellite, arrange watch parties and other events during the satellite’s mission. The satellite will broadcast a signal over amateur radio with its position in orbit and data from its sensors. Four high-powered LEDs will flash brightly enough to be seen from Earth as the EQUiSat passes across the night sky. The aim is for the satellite to be an orbiting ambassador to space, showing people that the final frontier is within their grasp. The satellite’s mission is an educational one. Sometime in late May or early June, ISS astronauts will deploy EQUiSat, along with several other CubeSats, into orbit some 250 miles above the Earth. “Sure we dreamt about the mythical time of ‘launch,’ but it was miles from reality when we wrote the application to NASA in 2014. it’s finally real.”ĮQUiSat is now cleared to be included on a NASA resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), scheduled to launch aboard an Antares rocket on May 1 from Wallops Island, Virginia. “The shortest version of how I feel is: AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” she wrote in an email. It’s a relief for it to have all gone well.”įor Hannah Varner, who graduated in 2014 as a team leader when the group first applied for a launch under NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, the feeling was something more like elation. “Despite having gained significantly more confidence in the satellite over the past few months, so much has gone wrong during the course of the program. Ray, a senior engineering concentrator and the team’s project manager. “When we completed all the systems checks and everything worked perfectly, I think we were honestly in disbelief,” said Hunter M. Last week that satellite, a 4-inch cube dubbed EQUiSat, passed its final preflight checks and is “go” for a scheduled May 20 launch. For the past seven years, a rotating group of Brown University undergraduates has been toiling away quietly in the Barus and Holley building - designing, building and testing a small satellite with the hope of ultimately sending into orbit.
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