Meet the team: Da Vinci

The ‘Da Vinci Satellite’ is a non-profit student team from Delft University of Technology, with the goal: ‘To inspire and enthuse the next generation for technology and spaceflight, while emphasizing the impact of spaceflight on our society’. In order to achieve this, the ‘Da Vinci Satellite’ team intends to put a 2U CubeSat in orbit around the Earth for pure educative purposes. The associated educational programme will offer many primary and high school students in both the Netherlands and the rest of the world the opportunity to come into contact with space travel!

The ‘Da Vinci Satellite’ will provide a direct connection to space for primary and secondary school children. Therefore, simultaneously with building the CubeSat, the team is developing educational packages to be used in schools that bring all satellite data into the classroom in a tangible and interactive manner as well as an online educational platform on which all educational material will be made available free of charge and in multiple languages.

The satellite itself contains two payloads that were, in cooperation with schools, specifically designed for this mission:

• The Dice Payload stems from a national competition we held amongst primary school students, asking them what they would be most interested about in space, and what they wanted to know about it. The answer most common was that they wanted to have the ability to “play a game” in space. So, in close cooperation with the Leidse Instrumentenmakers-school, the Dice payload was designed! Five dice, in the colourblind friendly IBM colour palette, are placed in a transparent chamber and able to move freely due to the microgravity. To determine the values rolled, a wall of the chamber is pushed towards the dice making the volume of the chamber smaller and trapping the dice between two walls. A picture of the dice is taken with the Earth in the background, which is then send back for the children to see.
• The Bitflip payload, designed for high schools, shows the effect of cosmic radiation on digitally stored pictures. The students can send an image up to the satellite which is subsequently stored. Due to the cosmic radiation the bits (0’s and 1’s) that store the image can be flipped. The image will be sent back after a while so the effects of the radiation can be observed. This information can be used to teach students about the effects of radiation on matter and the mathematical representation of probability in physics, as well as bit representation in computer programs.

The design of the satellite has completely and exclusively been done by our student team. The initial design was made during the Design Synthesis Exercise of the bachelor Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft in Summer 2019, where a group of 10 students designed a preliminary design in a 10-week period. In June 2019, the design was presented to a group of experts from the Dutch space industry. After this a new team was set up to work out this design in detail, which has since grown to over 80 students covering Management as well as Technical, Business and Education Departments. Together we will elevate education!