Columbia in space: NASA to launch student-built satellite

The satellite, a brainchild of Columbia Space Initiative and Columbia University Robotics Club, was accepted in late March to be launched by NASA. Columbia is one of eight sites, including Harvard College and the University of Texas at Austin, selected by the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative, which provides flight opportunities for educational and nonprofit organizations. CubeSats are miniature satellites that are both easier and cheaper to launch but can play instrumental roles in space research and exploration.

Along with NASA funding, the team has also been chosen by the inaugural University Nanosatellite Program Mission Concepts-1 Program, a collaboration between NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Space Force that provides $60,000 of funding, internships, and training to build the device.

The Columbia CubeSat, named (CU)besat-1, will photograph light emitted from gas atoms, which can indicate how gas behaves in neighboring galaxies and the spaces between them. Essentially, (CU)besat-1 is a small telescope able to track galaxies through space and time.

Advising the project is David Schiminovich, professor of astronomy and co-director of the Columbia astrophysics laboratory, along with Mike Massimino, professor of mechanical engineering and former NASA astronaut.

“[This will] push the team … to think about problems and solve things that may initially not have seemed possible,” Schiminovich said.

CSI Co-President Matthew Werneken, SEAS ’24, leads the project alongside former Co-President Bruno Rergis, SEAS ’23. Werneken got the idea during a summer working with Schiminovich. Schiminovich had already established a telescope called a Circumgalactic Hydrogen-Alpha Spectrograph, or CHaS, which was able to track gas. This device returned initial results indicating new insights into the history of the Squid Galaxy.

Werneken was tasked with sizing down the telescope to allow other researchers and enthusiasts to access it as an appendage on their own telescope, but he grew to realize the project could perform as a CubeSat when he and Schiminovich came upon a box of parts: the remnants of a 2018 CSI CubeSat endeavor that had fallen through.

Throughout the fall, Werneken, Rergis, and a number of CSI and Columbia Robotics members formed a working group dedicated to making the CubeSat happen. Later followed a 50-page proposal for their design, convincing NASA to award them a fully -funded launch opportunity.

“We’re essentially trying to take that entire [CHaS], condense it down into a box, and prove that the technology works for looking at galaxies and stuff above the atmosphere,” Werneken said.

(CU)besat-1 will capture valuable snapshots of electromagnetic waves from space through its spectrograph and telescope setup. The spectrograph captures the wavelength of light that atoms emit in different conditions. The pattern of wavelengths shifts when the atoms are moving, allowing the satellite to determine the motion of far-off galaxies.

Since it will be launched into space, (CU)besat-1 will not suffer from the atmospheric noise that telescopes must contend with on the ground. This data could yield important results and be used to cross-reference with the parent CHaS device. But because the device is small, its resolution will be worse than the larger, 2.4 meter CHaS, and the team will be unable to make adjustments once it is launched into orbit, where it will stay, presumably until it shuts down.

The significance of (CU)besat-1, Werneken said, is its capacity to further educational efforts.

“This CubeSat project will turn into a full year of curriculum for middle school students to learn about what goes into a satellite, what goes into launching things into space, talking about electronics, communication, basic mechanical engineering—everything that we could possibly teach them,” Werneken said.

CSI has a long partnership with Sophie Gerson Healthy Youth and Columbia Engineering Outreach to provide extra-curricular learning opportunities to over 500 students in underserved New York City public middle schools. The club plans to bring in the students as partners to build the satellite and analyze the data it collects.

Internally, the University Nanosatellite Program will give CSI resources to train its team to design and build the satellite. The award allows the team to send four interns—David McIntosh, SEAS ’24, Ines Khouider, SEAS ’25, Robert Pendergrast, SEAS ’26, and Nidhi Shah, SEAS ’26—to the Utah State University Space Dynamics Laboratory over the summer, where they will develop skills to take back to prototype (CU)besat-1.

“I got into engineering partly because I love solving problems,” Khouider said. “In that sense, space is unique in the way that you can accomplish exploring a frontier like that, or connecting the world through communication.”

The process to bring (CU)besat-1 to space will span the next few years as the team must first design and calibrate the satellite optics. The challenge is to build a way of orienting the satellite so it faces an area of interest; for example, a galaxy. A complicated feat of physics and engineering without the gravity of Earth, the plan involves a series of spinning reaction wheels to allow the satellite to rotate. This has been done before, but not extensively at the CubeSat scale.

Only after (CU)besat-1 is built and tested for its ability to withstand the extreme pressure and temperatures of its journey into orbit will the team receive a launch date. But once it is propelled into space, the satellite is there to stay.

“This will never come back from space once it’s put up. I mean, maybe in like a few thousand years, it’ll burn up in the atmosphere, but once we put it up, there’s no hunting these things down. They just float there until they eventually stop working,” Werneken said. “It’s a pretty strong commitment.”

Staff writer Lina Huang can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @l1nahuang.