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Nanosat finalists
A team of five Southampton students reached the finals of the UK’s Nanosat Design Competition 2022 with their innovative soil monitoring satellite invention.
They were one of five teams, from almost 50, to reach the final.
The aim of the competition, run by UK spaceflight programme Launch UK, was to design and build a nanosat (small satellite) that can be used to inform or provide innovative solutions to support the UK’s climate change or decarbonisation efforts.
The Southampton team designed a nanosat that uses reflected signals from other satellites to estimate soil moisture content. It could be used for peatland conservation, gathering soil moisture data, and for flood, drought and wildfire risk mapping.
The team comprised Engineering PhD student Hazel Mitchell, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering with Spacecraft Engineering students Robert Oxford Pope and Ceris Brown, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering student Harvey James O’Sullivan Ryder, and Physics and Astronomy student Ethan Tregidga.
The competition concluded at the Farnborough Air Show in July 2022, where the five teams were invited to present and demonstrate their designs. The winners were a team from the University of Glasgow who designed a nanosat to analyse shorelines and coastal vegetation to understand the impact of climate change on coastal regions.
The Southampton nanosat competition team
The Southampton team’s nanosat design
The nanosat with a drag sail for deorbiting
