June 20, 2011
The FASTRAC mission is right on track with a new milestone reached on March 22. At 6:35 a.m., the two nanosatellites, named Emma and Sara Lily, successfully separated in space and continued communicating. Since the initial FASTRAC launch on Nov. 19, the student team has been tracking the satellites and troubleshooting any communication or control challenges they have encountered.
"As much now as it was the first day, it's still so incredible to me to be able to operate and talk to a satellite you've worked on and to see that they're still performing phenomenally," said Sebastian Muñoz, the FASTRAC project manager. He said the team is now downloading GPS data collected from the satellites so they can move on analyzing that data in the final stage of the mission.
Now that we're beginning to post process this data, I'm excited to see what the performance of our GPS receiver is," Muñoz said. "We're going to take a look at that data and see if we can get some science out of it."
"As the first student-developed mission in the world involving two satellites that orbit and communicate with one another in real time, the team enjoyed a congratulatory pizza party on April 8 held by Emergent Space Technologies. Several of the company's employees shared in the celebration and socialized with the team.
"The party was to give the team a thumbs up and tell them good job," said Professor Glenn Lightsey, the FASTRAC faculty advisor. "We've nearly accomplished all the mission objectives, which is a really great achievement, given some of the challenges we've had on this project."
One of those challenges included making adjustments to get the separation to work properly – all part of the learning process, Lightsey said.
"You can't stop solving problems just because the satellite is in space," he said. "You have to keep working with the design to get the satellite to do what you want it to do. The satellites separated, and interestingly, for a few days we were not really able to communicate with them because after they separated, they started to tumble. That extra dynamic in the motion makes it more difficult to talk to the satellite because the radio is moving and rotating, so for a few days, we weren't sure how it was going to go."
As it turned out, the team was able to communicate with both satellites individually rather than having to communicate with Emma exclusively through Sara Lily.
"That's something we weren't able to do before the separation," Lightsey said. "We didn't know what was going to happen. There was some question about whether we'd ever be able to communicate with Emma again."
Another FASTRAC achievement has been making the ground station completely automated.
"An operator doesn't have to be there. The ground station is capable of operating the satellites by itself," said Muñoz, who described what comes next for the team. "Towards mid-fall, we'll have another opportunity for the satellites to come close together and do relative navigation, and at that point, we will have fulfilled all our mission goals," he said.
For Lightsey, part of the excitement has been watching the culmination of seven years worth of student work.
"I am so proud of the students and the incredible effort they’ve put in over the whole program since we started," he said. "I'm also exceptionally happy that we'll accomplish our full mission, which is a great achievement for the department and for the university."
