Cal Poly satellite will launch into space in NASA mission. What will the CubeSat do?
A Cal Poly satellite approximately the size of a loaf of bread will launch into space Wednesday if all goes to plan, the university announced Monday.
ExoCube 2 is a CubeSat device, a nanosatellite that was built over several years by a group of 50 Cal Poly students.
The ExoCube 2 will be launched between 7 to 10 a.m. Wednesday alongside nine other tiny, NASA-sponsored satellites on the space agency’s next Educational Launch of Nanosatellites mission, or ELaNa for short. ELaNa is an initiative created by NASA that intends to attract and retain students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines.
The launch will be carried out by Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket — a craft built and operated by the private company to allow government agencies and private companies to launch small satellites into orbit “on your own schedule,” according to the company’s website. The jet carrying the rocket, also owned by Virgin, will take off from Mojave Air & Space Port and release the rocket off the coast of Southern California.
Should bad weather interfere with the launch, there are more dates in January that could serve as alternates, according to the university.
The Cal Poly project was overseen by Pauline Faure, an aerospace engineering assistant professor in Cal Poly’s College of Engineering.
“The mission is scientific in nature,” Faure said, “and aims to acquire data on ions’ mass and density in the exosphere,” the uppermost region of Earth’s atmosphere as it gradually fades into the vacuum of space.
“To execute the mission, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed a spectrometer, and the Cal Poly CubeSat Laboratory team was tasked to design, develop, manufacture, assemble and test the supporting elements of the spacecraft system,” Faure said. “The students were definitely the driver of the project execution and deserve the full credit of the incredible work they achieved.”
When the ExoCube 2 is in orbit in the exosphere at about 370 miles above sea level, students on the ground will use Cal Poly’s CubeSat Lab station to download scientific data from the satellite and share it with their counterparts at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois.
Those two universities are responsible for interpreting the data that comes from the satellite.
The data will help scientists expand their knowledge on the composition and current state of activity in the exosphere atmosphere. Additionally, the data will be useful in better predicting space weather phenomena in order to forecast the potential effects of ions on satellite communications and spacecraft performance.
The ExoCube 2 is Cal Poly’s 12th CubeSat device. It’s a relaunch and redesign of the original ExoCube, which launched in early 2015 but suffered antenna problems.
Cal Poly’s last ELaNa satellite was LEO, or Launch Environment Observer, a two-unit CubeSat that launched in June 2019 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
According to NASA, CubeSats are designed to be about 4 inches cubed. “CubeSats can be built in a single unit, or combined in units of two, three or six,” the space agency said. “A single unit must weigh less than 1.33 kilograms, or 3 pounds.”
The other nine CubeSats on this mission were designed and built by seven other universities in the United States, as well as one NASA center. They include satellites from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Colorado, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee; University of Louisiana at Lafayette in Louisiana and Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
“The journey to this launch has been long and challenging,” Scott Higginbotham, ELaNa 20 mission manager, said in a Cal Poly news release. “Our CubeSat developers have invested much of themselves in their spacecraft, and I know they’ll all be thrilled to see them fly later this month.”
