‘Green light’ for ALEASAT test opportunity
SFU (Simon Fraser University) Satellite Design Team & UBC (University of British Columbia) Orbit University team have been selected for the February 2024 test window of the Fly Your Satellite! Test Opportunities programme following a call for proposals opened in September 2023. The proposal evaluation and selection were carried out by Fly Your Satellite! Team and CubeSat Support Facility (CSF) operators. Following the test preparation phase, the team successfully passed their campaign ‘green light meeting’, granting their test opportunity at ESEC Galaxia!
ESA invited university student teams from ESA Member States, Canada, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia who would like to receive support and training in conducting an environmental test campaign, with mainly educational objectives to propose their test plan and device for the “Fly Your Satellite!” (FYS) test opportunities programme.
Following the selection process, the team was invited to present their test proposal to the Fly Your Satellite! Team at the programme kick-off meeting held in October 2023. During the same event, the students were offered a webinar on environmental testing offered by CSF operators.
The selected team did an outstanding job in presenting their test proposal and responding to the questions raised by the Fly Your Satellite! team. The kick-off meeting was followed by the test preparation phase in which the students, supported by CSF test operators, carefully prepared their test specifications to meet their test objectives and test requirements. The test preparation phase concluded with a ‘green light’ meeting with CSF test operators where the team presented their test specifications along with hardware readiness. The positive outcome of this meeting granted the team access to the CubeSat Support Facility to execute their test campaign! Congratulations to the team!
More about the team
The ALEASAT project began in January 2020, and is a joint project between members of SFU Satellite Design Team and UBC Orbit to design and build a 1U, dual payload CubeSat.
The primary mission of ALEASAT is to provide the Canadian amateur radio community with a training satellite to assist in disaster mitigation and relief via on-demand satellite imagery, and possibly serve as a precursor to a fully functional amateur disaster monitoring satellite constellation.
The secondary mission seeks to determine how a spinning mass on board the satellite affects the orientation of the satellite in space and uses the results to validate assumptions when estimating the effect of a full-size human centrifuge on a larger spacecraft or space station.
Lastly, the project also aims to provide UBC and SFU students with the opportunity to design, build, and operate a spacecraft, and to support educational outreach activities for university and secondary school students.
Stay tuned for the follow-up on their test campaign and for the next test opportunities! More information about the Fly Your Satellite! Test Opportunities programme can be found here.