A team of undergraduate and graduate students from Brown University’s School of Engineering has successfully launched a satellite designed and built on a tight budget

FOCUS | ENGINEERING

Brown students’ satellite in orbit on shoestring

BY CLAUDIA CHIAPPA | Chiappa@PBN.com

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE a billionaire to go to space. In fact, all you need is about $10,000, some engineering skills and a little help at liftoff. A group of Brown University students has proved it.

The team of undergraduate and graduate students from Brown’s School of Engineering has successfully launched a satellite that’s a little more than a foot long, made of off-the-shelf parts, and designed and built on a very tight budget.

The microsatellite – dubbed SBUDNIC – was launched in May in partnership with the National Research Council in Italy.

It was Rick Fleeter, adjunct associate professor of engineering at Brown, that gave students in his Design of Space Systems class the unusual assignment: construct your own satellite and get it into space. Adding to the challenge: the students only had a few thousand dollars and one year to do it.

“Nothing in space happens fast,” said Selia Jindal, a rising senior at Brown and project manager of SBUDNIC. “And I think that’s one of the

SPACECRAFT: Recent Brown University graduate Marco Cross displays a mockup of the miniature satellite a team of Brown students built. The satellite is now in orbit.

PBN PHOTO/ELIZABETH GRAHAM

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insanely revolutionary things about SBUDNIC. It’s showing that this is possible in the age of the billionaire’s space race, when the only people that have access to space are people with tons of resources and time.”

Fleeter himself had received the launch opportunity from Lorenzo Bigagli, a researcher at the National Research Council in Italy.

Total funding for the mission was about $35,000, provided by the National Research Council, NASA Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium and Brown. While most of the money went toward research, the satellite itself was built on a budget of a little over $10,000. In contrast, an average 3U CubeSat satellite – a miniature, low-orbit satellite such as SBUDNIC – requires a budget of several million dollars.

It was an unlikely team, made up of students from various backgrounds and expertise levels. Some of them had little experience with engineering. Many had none.

“At the time, we were all students and none of us had ever done this before. So we really had to teach ourselves how to make this happen,” said Marco Cross, a recent Brown graduate in biomedical engineering and chief engineer of the project.

The minuscule budget meant making a lot of adjustments and sacrifices, including cutting some features from the satellite and spending late nights testing their creation.

Why call it SBUDNIC? The name is a loose acronym for Satellite by Brown University and Deorbit and the Institute of CNR. It’s also an homage to the world’s first manmade satellite Sputnik, built by Russia in the late 1950s.

One of the main features that allowed the students to build SBUDNIC on a budget was the choice of materials, commercial parts that were assembled by the students themselves. For instance, the Kapton tape used on SBUDNIC was purchased from Home Depot.

The other piece of the puzzle was its short life expectancy.

The satellite is powered by 48 Energizer AA lithium batteries, the type available at local stores. It’s projected that the batteries will last up to four months. Once powered off, the satellite will remain in orbit for about six years, and it features a special drag device that will “deorbit” the satellite, allowing it to return to Earth.

“Since satellites cost so much, there is a lot of pressure they should last a very long time,” Fleeter said. “If you decide it doesn’t have to last a long time, it simplifies the design.”

SBUDNIC was shot into space from Cape Canaveral in Florida on May 25 as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

By allowing themselves to build a satellite that will only remain in orbit a few years, compared with the decades of typical satellites, the Brown team was able to significantly cut costs. A quicker mission also helps limit debris in space, an issue that’s become an increasing concern for NASA.

“There is value from an ecological point of view for satellites that don’t stay up long and come down after not long,” Fleeter said.

What does SBUDNIC do in orbit? It will record temperatures and take photos at about 300 miles above the Earth’s surface, transmitting lowresolution images on the amateur radio band.

Still, the project has been lifechanging for some of the students.

Jindal, who is studying international relations and affairs, is now onto her next space adventure as an intern with Lockheed Martin Space, a division of the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp., which has an office in Middletown. Cross is already working on another miniature satellite project at Brown, this one with a $1 million budget.

And SBUDNIC is inspiring others to set their eyes on space. The team has been engaged in an educational outreach program to talk to people about the satellite and get young people interested in space.

“It’s valuable to be able to show future students and researchers and scientists that space is something they have access to,” Jindal said. “It shows that we’re actually being able to have a reach and impact and influence the future world of scientists in space expeditions, and I think that’s something that’s really valuable and that means a lot.”

Fleeter is hoping the project illustrates that space can be accessible to those who might not have millions of dollars to spend and might not want to embark on lengthy and complicated missions.

“There’s a real industry growing around the idea of, what has the mainstream industry been ignoring? What are we not doing?” Fleeter said. “It grows space business by creating new things you can do in space, expanding the realm of what space business does.” n

‘We really had to teach ourselves how to make this happen.’

MARCO CROSS, recent Brown University graduate

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