The University of Alabama in Huntsville Space Hardware Club is preparing to launch its largest payload yet into the upper atmosphere from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Through NASA’s RockSat Program, students work closely with NASA personnel on three payloads, each larger than the last. UAH’s first payload launched in June 2022. This August’s launch will be its third — RockSat-X. The RockSat-X project will be launched into space on NASA sounding rockets.
“RockSat-X is the biggest,” said Ben Campbell, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering systems that works with the Space Hardware Club on its TERMINUS (Teaching Experimental Research Methods to Investigate the Nature of the Upper-atmosphere and Space) projects. “You choose your own experiments, and it’s fully up to the group to decide whatever it wants to make for a spacecraft.”
The payload for the August launch includes two primary systems: a spacecraft bus called JUPITER, short for Joint Union of Payload Information and Technology between Experiments and Rockets, and a special satellite deployment experiment called SwingSat.
JUPITER seeks to reduce the cost and complexities of future TERMINUS payloads by being reusable and modular.
With SwingSat, the group hopes to demonstrate an alternative method of deploying satellites by utilizing four devices called momentum exchange tethers at SmallSat-scale. The system will employ a centrifugal release system to dispense multiple satellites without propellant.
CubeSats, small satellites that typically use commercial off-the-shelf components for their electronics and structures, are limited in their capabilities of maneuvering in space. Small-scale tethers like those flying on UAH’s August RockSat-X launch could set an example to open up numerous possibilities for deploying future small satellites.
“The altitude range is 150-170 kilometers,” well beyond the Karman line, which is the boundary of space, says Campbell. “We’ll be active for about 13-15 minutes. After the launch, the outer skirt of the rocket will separate, then over the next 30 seconds or so the CubeSat will unspool the tethers to go through some extension, rotation and release maneuvers. It’s kind of like the idea of a shepherd’s sling, like David used to defeat Goliath, except slinging satellites instead of stones. The whole reason this is being investigated is that traditionally, you need some sort of thruster to get anywhere far in space. CubeSats are small, so it’s hard to add in conventional thrusters. This is an alternative way to deploy them using basic rotating motion, simply ‘throwing’ the thing.”
