As the students sat inside room 123 at the Nussbaum Science Building on Taylor University’s campus Saturday, they were waiting on their hard work to literally go up in smoke.
Then came the count, and at precisely 12:36 p.m. the launch happened.
Taylor University students and the nearby company NearSpace Launch helped build a pair of satellites that were launched into orbit on Saturday.
During the semester, the students had worked on programming the newly minted ThinSats, which are more akin to the size of a slice of bread than the traditional satellites one would picture.
These were the eighth and ninth satellites that Taylor students have constructed, but only the fifth and sixth to take flight.
The satellites were launched onboard the NG-15 Cygnus spacecraft from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.
The satellites the students made may be simplified, but the data that they gather is significant.
The ThinSats the students built will gather data at a level that most of the more expensive weather satellites cannot reach. This means the students will be collecting data from an area where there is not much known, and they have a chance to break new ground and make discoveries.
After the launch, it didn’t take long for data to start coming in.
“We received Globalstar data in the first 11 minutes after deployment over the remote region of South Atlantic Ocean,” Matt Voss, NearSpace Launch Chief Operations Officer said in an interview with SpaceNews. “NearSpace Launch and Virginia Space are still doing analysis of mission results and diagnostic of the STEM mission.
The satellites will be in the earth’s orbit for one to five days before returning back to the surface.
COVID-19 forced much of the planning for the launch to be done through Zoom meetings, Taylor Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Stefan Brandle said.
The program did present a few challenges to the students and helped them learn to work with a team while also giving them the programming, problem solving and troubleshooting skills necessary to be successful as they pursue post-graduate education.
“The programing they are doing is low level embedded programming, which there is actually a lot of,” Brandle said. “A Ford F-150 has 150 million lines of code. That’s stuff like this, it’s just on a car, not a satellite, but it’s similar stuff.”
Brandle said there are very few undergraduate students who get the chance to have this kind of experience before graduate school.
“For resume material, undergrads in the U.S., almost none of them have the chance to work on a satellite,” said Brandle. “Some of the people in there are student managers for the project and they’ve been getting hired by satellite communications companies.”
Jonathan Pugsley, a computer engineer and mechanical engineering student, said being able to be involved in the process has helped him learn skills that help him in his career-focused field, but also in life.
In addition to the skills that he learned, Pugsley said it is also fun to see how people react to him saying he played a role in launching a satellite.
“It’s been a lot of fun honestly,” Pugsley said. “Launching satellites is something you can say, and you get a reaction.”
Inspiring others to pursue the field is something that Pugsley said was important to him.
“I had some of that experience in high school on a robotics team,” said Pugsley. “Different area, but the same kind of thing where we can be involved in something that’s really cool and get inspired from that to pursue that field further in life. I’m really happy to be a part of something that enabling that for other people.”