August 10, 2011
Aerospace engineering graduate student Henri Kjellberg's moment of clarity came during his undergraduate co-op experience working for United Space Alliance at NASA Johnson Space Center's (JSC) neutral buoyancy lab. He noticed something about the employees with the most exciting jobs.
"I found the people with the highest degrees had the coolest jobs at NASA," he said. "So that convinced me that I shouldn't go into the industry before getting an advanced degree."
Because he's "terribly in love with Austin," Kjellberg stayed at UT after earning his Bachelor's in Aerospace Engineering in 2008, and his National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship gives him the freedom to work exclusively on tiny satellites called "CubeSats" in the picosatellite lab. For Kjellberg, working with Dr. Lightsey and other graduate students in the lab is about more than building cutting-edge satellites small enough to fit into a briefcase. It's also about the entrepreneurial experience of running a small business of sorts.
"We have to buy a lot of hardware and technologies from vendors and deliver them to our customer, NASA," Kjellberg explained. "We have a budget, and it's completely student-driven."
That student-driven project is a joint one between NASA-JSC, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, with teams from both universities working together on a series of four missions with NASA that will hopefully result in the autonomous rendezvous of two small satellites.
"The idea behind the mission is to take two rather small satellites, let them separate and drift apart and then let them change their orbits on their own to come back together and then dock to each other," he said. "CubeSats are becoming a viable platform for science, military and commercial missions, and the really cool thing about what we're doing is getting the attitude determination and control problem solved."
A satellite capable of changing its attitude and its velocity in space meets two technological requirements necessary for independent satellites to perform a rendezvous. The UT team delivered their first satellite, BEVO-1, to NASA last summer and watched it launch along with Texas A&M's satellite. Although the two satellites did not separate after releasing from the space shuttle, Kjellberg said the BEVO-1 mission allowed the UT team to develop the basic architecture for a satellite.
"It's very much hands-on and hardware-oriented because we're building extremely complex devices," he said. "I like these hardcore research problems and developing new technology."
In the longer term, Kjellberg hopes to find a way to use his degree and stay in Austin, the city he and his wife consider "the promised land." As she finishes her veterinary medicine degree at Texas A&M, Kjellberg commutes to Austin to spend time in the lab planning and building the next satellite.
"It's like a very complex iPhone that flies in space and can control itself," he said. "We get to build a very complicated device, but we also get to run a very complicated small business."
