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	Electrical engineering students Michelle Chavez, left, and Lee Finley work on the latest nanosatellite project at NMSU. Photo by Darren Phillips

A Stable of NMSU Payloads
by Karl Hill

Tomorrow's spacecraft will carry more than people

Stephen Horan has a vision: A stable of student-built payloads, space-qualified and ready to hitch a ride on vehicles launched at the Southwest Regional Spaceport.

Even test flights could be used to put student-built nanosatellites in orbit, said Horan, head of NMSU’s Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a leader of the university’s aerospace research cluster.

“Before they take people up as passengers, they can demonstrate their capabilities by taking our stuff up,” he said. “Quite often they’re going to carry a bag of sand for ballast. Our satellites weigh about 20 kilos (about 44 pounds) – why not use one of these? We want to work with the commercial entities to do these things.”

Horan and his faculty colleagues and NMSU engineering students are developing their third small satellite project now. In the first, an Air Force-funded collaboration with two other universities, two satellites were launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard a Delta IV experimental rocket. The mission was to capture stereo images of cloud formations from space.

The mission was a “successful failure,” Horan said. The satellites passed every test, but the rocket failed to perform as required and the satellites did not make it into orbit.

The second satellite, an all-NMSU project funded through the design and build stages by the Air Force, has a science mission important to NASA’s program to search for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

“NASA wants to build a large spacebased detector to look for ionization tracks made in the atmosphere as cosmic rays pass through,” said Steve Stochaj, the science coordinator on the project.

Because the light given off by the cosmic rays is in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, designers of the detector need to know how much background ultraviolet radiation is reflected by the earth. The NMSU satellite has two instruments to measure the ultraviolet rays, one that would look into space and one that would look down at the planet, to provide the needed benchmarks.

About 50 students in electrical engineering “capstone” design classes worked on this project, but the satellite was not selected for launching in the Air Force’s highly competitive university nanosatellite program.

“We are looking for a ride,” Stochaj said. “We’re talking with the Physical Science Laboratory (at NMSU) about it going as a parasite on an experimental balloon flight.”

The third project, NMSUSat 2, has the ultimate goal of developing a satellite with a robotic arm. It is being tackled in stages.

A NASA spacesuit that was worn by an astronaut in space was on display at the White Sands Test Range info booth at the X-Prize symposium held at Corbett Center on campus. Photo by Darren Phillips

“The plan is to build a succession of satellites where each one is more sophisticated than the previous one,” Stochaj said. “The first stage is to figure out a way to stabilize it so it isn’t just tumbling through space.”

Electrical engineering students are working on the stability issue and mechanical engineering professor Ou Ma is leading the development of the robotic arm.

Besides the nanosatellite projects, Horan sees the university developing the capabilities for testing, preparing – and repairing, if necessary – payloads built by others for launching at the spaceport.

“We could test payloads, take them to the flight line and get them ready for launch,” he said. “Suppose something breaks – rather than ship it somewhere to be repaired, we could fix it, revalidate it and get it ready to launch right here.”

That, in part, is what the new aerospace age at NMSU will look like, Horan said. “We will be able to tell spaceport companies, you can come here and pick up students who already know how to build things that are space-qualified. They know how to prepare for a design review. They have interdisciplinary team experience and total systems experience.”

Lee Finley is one such student. A graduate student in electrical engineering, he served as student program manager on the nanosatellite project until he completed his master’s degree in December. Waiting for him was a job as a systems engineer for a space communications company, “doing the same kinds of studies that we do with the nanosat program.”