March 31, 2016
Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our Texas Spacecraft Lab student team, the Bevo-2 satellite was successfully deployed into space from the AggieSat4 satellite early this year on Jan. 30.
Since 2006, The University of Texas at Austin has been collaborating with Texas A&M University on the LONESTAR satellite program supported by NASA Johnson Space Center to test autonomous rendezvous and docking maneuvers.
LONESTAR, which stands for Low Earth Orbiting Navigation Experiment for Spacecraft Testing Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking, consists of a two-part series. The first pair of satellites were launched in 2009. Bevo-2 and AggieSat4, the second pair of satellites, were launched to the International Space Station (ISS) last December.
Since work on Bevo-2 began in 2010, over 50 graduate and undergraduate students from the Cockrell School of Engineering designed, created and built Bevo-2 in the Texas Spacecraft Lab (TSL). Now that the satellites are in space, students will monitor them from the ground station located at the W.R. Woolrich Laboratories. Both UT and A&M students will be in charge of monitoring the satellites in space.
Aside from a few components purchased off the shelf, UT students manufactured and customized the circuit boards, structure, and almost every line of code for the Texas satellite, said Parker Francis (B.S. ASE ‘14), mission manager of LONESTAR. Francis is currently a graduate student at Georgia Tech.
"There weren't professional engineers helping us along the way," he said.
The two satellites were released into space together from the ISS on Jan. 29, with Bevo-2 stored in a metal pod within AggieSat4. The following day, the UT satellite was successfully deployed into space from the Aggie satellite using a spring-loaded pusher plate.
Once operational in space, the attitude determination and control system's software will be checked which involves recording sensor measurements, downlinking the data and analyzing how well the satellite knows the direction it is pointed.
“Further testing would extend this to testing different control schemes and verifying how well the satellite can point at different objects in space,” said Francis. “The big final test would be firing the miniature thruster, and analyzing its performance in orbit. The thruster is a really exciting technology that will enable small satellites to do a variety of very interesting missions in the future.”
Both satellites will remain in orbit for approximately nine months before the atmospheric drag causes them to deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
Aerospace engineering senior Ashleigh Caison, who currently works in the TSL, said that it was rewarding to see the satellite that she worked on be deployed into space.
“It's incredibly motivating to see a project reach such a final stage, and amazing to think about all the students who put work in to make this project successful,” Caison said.
