Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Last Visit With LightSail 2 at the Cubesat Developers Workshop

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

Mat Kaplan visits Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for a last, clean room visit with LightSail 2, the Planetary Society’s solar sailing cubesat.  While there, Mat also talked to attendees at the Cubesat Developers Workshop, including the creator of the tiny “Pocket Rocket” engine for small spacecraft. LightSail2 is now at the Air Force Research Lab for launch preparation, as we hear from Bruce Betts in this week’s What’s Up. You can learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0515-2019-2019-lightsail2-cubesat-developers.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Light Sail and other Cubes of Wonder, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Happy 20th birthday, CubeSats! The first of you were born in 1999 at Stanford University and on the hillside campus of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. CubeSats are those tiny spacecraft based on one or more 10-centimeter cubes, each of which should not weigh much more than a kilogram. They started a revolution in the creation of satellites. Even high schools now have space within their grasp. NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and other major players are also experimenting with them. NASA and JPL successfully sent the Marco CubeSats on a fly-by

Mars mission, accompanying the InSight lander. Cal Poly hosts the CubeSat developers workshop every year. Hundreds of CubeSat creators and the vendors who work with them spend three days on campus sharing their projects and pride. That might have been enough to get me to drive up the California coast in late April, but there was another reason for me to visit the campus. The Planetary Society's Light Sail 2 CubeSat was about to be shipped off to the Air Force Research Lab in preparation for its launch by the next SpaceX Falcon Heavy. I wanted to have one more look at our baby. So we've just come through the plastic sheets into the clean room where LightSail 2 has been living for a good long while now. And we are doing this with John Bilardo.

John, thank you for the invitation. Absolutely. You're welcome. Remind us of what your role is with LightSail. Sure. So Cal Poly has provided a lot of the software support for LightSail. We've done the flight software build. We've also provided support for testing. So, for example, when we were doing the day-in-the-life test for LightSail about a year or so ago, LightSail was out here at our facilities in one of our larger high bay chambers. We were deploying the sail and making sure that it was

going to operate successfully in space. There's a great video, time-lapse video of that, that we will point people to from this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. It's been a while since I've been up. It's great to come back to the source because really CubeSats pretty much got their start here, right? Absolutely. The Geordie Bixquari founded the lab about 20 years ago and started working on CubeSats right around the same time. And we were one of the very first institutions that helped create the standard and also develop deployers and keeps hats themselves. So in addition to your role with LightSail 2, you've got a few other jobs.

Don't you run this lab? I do. I'm the lab director. Jordi retired about a year ago, so I'm in charge of our 60, 70 students plus three staff and three faculty, including myself. Now, we've barely made it into the clean room so far, and I've got my jacket and my hairnet or my cap on and my booties. Here are these cabinets that are just full of, if not CubeSats, at least Peapods, right? Yes. So what you're looking at is the storage cabinets and our flight hardware. Right now is actually a treat. We just, a couple weeks ago, were helping with the STP2 integration. That's the same launch that LightSol is going to be on.

There's a number of other CubeSats on that launch as well, and they were coming through here, being put into the Peapods, having the Peapods tested. And they're now effectively stored here, full of their various wonderful CubeSats, ready to launch into space as soon as we're asked to deliver the Peapods. You know, we'll do that. Which hopefully won't be long.

Where have they come from? They came from a whole number of sources, including other universities, government agencies, and whatnot. As we were walking up here, your ground station was reorienting. The antenna was moving. And we were told that there are three CubeSats that you have responsibility for right now that are up in orbit? Yeah, there are three that we're actively tracking and talking to. And there are a number of others that we're sort of passively tracking and trying to see if we hear signals from. So for example, Dave, which is launched, you know, maybe six months ago or so now, is an experiment. We continue to

get pictures down from that. We continue to get vibrations data, which is the primary tech demo for that particular mission. That's one of the multiple spacecrafts we're operating at the moment. And I heard that you have one from a high school. Absolutely. We are assisting Irvine as a high school consortium. They have two spacecraft up there right now, Irvine 01 and Irvine 02, and we've been helping them track and receive the data from their spacecraft. Yeah, so I'm an old anteater, so we used to go to those high schools now and then and even recruited a few radio people from there, but they weren't building spacecraft at the time. No, this is a very new and ambitious program, and I've talked to many of the students who have gone through it, and they get a lot out of it, and they're all

super excited, and a lot of them do go on to the aerospace industry. So let's go a little bit further in here because over there on the table with a couple of your students is our baby. Absolutely. So we have the flight model for LightSail 2 here. It's currently stored inside one of our test pods. This is not a flight pod, but it's a test pod. It's stored in there to protect the satellite while it's here at Cal Poly to help prevent damage. So these two guys, who we'll meet in a second, they said that you told them, go ahead and pull it out an inch or two for Matt. I was terrified. I didn't want any part of this, because you know what Bruce Betts would do to me if anything happened to this spacecraft while I was here, and because I was wanting to make radio?

happen to this spacecraft while I was here and because I was wanting to make radio? Absolutely. I know Bruce very well and I can assure him that it is in safe hands. I'm glad. It certainly looked like it was in very safe hands. Introduce me to these guys. Actually, one of them I know because he's a listener to Planetary Radio. Jordan. Jordan Tickton. It's wonderful to finally be on the show instead of listening to it. Well, you've been quoted on the show and you, what, did you win a t-shirt or a rubber asteroid? Both because it was like three years ago on the old design. Okay. And who's your buddy here? I'm Aaron Fielden. I haven't listened to the show, but I'm really excited to start. Third year mechanical undergrad at Cal Poly and I've been involved with this CubeSat lab since my freshman year. A veteran, if you will, to the clean room. Jordan, what's your position, and what year are you in

school, and how long have you been on this? So I'm actually newer to the CubeSat lab. I joined back in November, but I've been interning at JPL for the past few years in quality assurance, and I had one internship at SpaceX in supply chain. I've done aerospace stuff beforehand. I just, I'm new to the lab here. I'm actually strange. Most of our members are all undergrads. I'm one of two grad students. So I'm doing my master's in industrial engineering. You got to tell me about this opportunity

to be able to hands-on work with, assemble, do all the other stuff that has to be done to create real spacecraft, not just spacecraft, but pioneering spacecraft that are going to be testing technologies that are still very, very innovative, very new in themselves. Yeah, it's a totally surreal experience. As an undergrad, I came in as a mechanical student.

I wasn't super familiar with the aerospace industry, but once I learned about Lab, I got a tour. I was like, this is crazy. The things that folks my age are doing is absolutely incredible. aerospace industry. But once I learned about lab, I got a tour. I was like, this is crazy. Like the things that folks my age are doing is absolutely incredible. And after my first year in lab, I got recruited to be a manager position, a little less technical, but I'm kind of in charge of keeping a schedule and maintaining, you know, making sure everyone does what they need to do for a spacecraft for an actual spacecraft that's launching later this year that we're working hard to get finished.

And it's just, it's a totally surreal experience. It's the first time we got pictures from Dave. It was like, this is crazy. This doesn't make sense. You feel the same way? Absolutely. One of the reasons I wanted to join was because you get to get hands on with the real equipment. You know, being at JPL was amazing.

I get to work on these fantastical things that are going to other planets. I got a whole ceiling in my hands that's going to Mars. But when I'm here, you get a totally different experience. You know, it's not going to Mars, but I get to work on the whole thing from soup to nuts, from beginning to end. Whereas I spent a whole summer working one part, I get to spend a few months here working on everything related to satellites. And you get a much bigger picture. John, you've got to have some people come up to you saying, you let undergrads do this stuff?

Yeah, we do get all sorts of interesting reactions. But one story I think helps support what Aaron and Jordan were telling you is that maybe about 10 years ago, back when CubeSats, before they had started to become really popular, hiring managers would say, golly, if I have a college student applying to my company and they have flight experience on their resume, it's just an automatic hire. I hardly have to even bring them in for an interview. Fast forward 10 years now, they come in and they're looking for the flight. You don't have the flight experience on

your resume out of college. That's just to get your foot in the door, right? Which is a phenomenal change and it's a great experience for the students. And you've had a great track record. So many students, graduates, who've come out of here and are doing great things in the industry. I'll just mention one who's still very much involved with the LightSail project, and that's Alex Diaz. Yeah, Alex, absolutely. He graduated a number of years ago from our computer engineering program, and he has worked on a lot of the electronics and some of the software as well for LightSail 2. He's been an integral part of LightSail 2, LightSail 1, so the whole LightSail program he's been involved in for many, many years. All right, let's bring it back to this nice little CubeSat sitting on the table in front of us. Is it set to go? It's almost ready, right?

The flight unit is complete. Since it's been stored for so long, we like to do periodic battery top-offs and things like that, right? So depending on when it actually ends up being delivered to be integrated with the rocket and with Prox-1, there may be some more charging that happens before it leaves here, but largely that's about all we have left to do for it. And Prox-1, of course, is that, why don't you describe it a little bit, it's that other spacecraft which is kind of going to be the enveloping light sail for a bit. Yeah, exactly. Light sail and PROX-1, or light sail 2 and PROX-1, were designed sort of as a joint mission.

Light sail 2 is going to be placed inside of PROX-1, so it's in a normal Cal Poly peapod, a dispenser, and that in turn gets placed inside PROX-1. PROX-1 is what's actually going to deploy off the rocket, and it's going to float around for a week or so. And then after that time, it's going to release LightSail 2. So when LightSail 2 gets released, it's not going to be immediately, you know, as part of the launch timeline. It's going to be a number of days later, and it's going to be released from another satellite, not released directly from the rocket. It's almost like one of those little nesting Russian dolls. Yes, it is. And the Peapod, it's pretty simple technology, right? It's just a spring, isn't it? The beauty of the Peapod is not

in the design, the mechanical design. The beauty of the Peapod is that it isolates the rocket from those really ugly, dirty CubeSats that threaten to damage the rocket, right? So the Peapod is actually all about protecting the rocket. I had no idea. Yeah, absolutely. Because in order to fly, you have to prove you're going to do no damage to the rocket, right?

Because the last thing they're going to let on is anything that adds risk to your mission, to your launch, right? And so the whole design goal of the P-Bot wasn't to be this fancy complex thing. It was really to protect the rocket. And so it's a nice simple design. It's reliable, relatively straightforward to put together. It's been tested a huge amount, right? We've done a lot of stress testing and other kind of environmental testing on it to make sure that, you know, if something happens to a satellite, unfortunately, inside one of the CubeSats inside, it's not going to end up damaging the launch vehicle. And that's actually the primary role of the Peapod.

This is so obscure. I don't even know if it'll make it into the show. But the thing that you made me think of is the sequence in the book, The Martian, where they're sending up the supply rocket that's going to give some food to the poor guy who's stuck on Mars and tired of potatoes. And a cargo shifts, and that's enough to destroy the mission. There shouldn't be any shifting cargo inside our peapods, we have interface standards that really prevent that. But that's the kind of thing that launch vehicles are concerned about, right? Because they have really high-value primary payloads, and we're just hitching a ride, and we can't add any risk. Even a perceived butterfly flaps their wings in China, and then there's a rocket issue somewhere else.

We can't tolerate that. That's really what the pe PPOD's main goal is. Could you go over a little bit, just a brief idea, of how this spacecraft, which from the outside to a layperson like me looks the same, how it differs from LightSail 1? LightSail 1 was obviously a demonstration of the sail. The primary objective was to deploy the sail and prove that the mechanisms worked, in addition to taking a lot of lessons learned,

so that when we fly LightSail 2, we could apply those and end up with a more successful result. So some of the things that we've improved between LightSail 1 and LightSail 2, if you go back and look at some of the public imagery that Planetary Society has put out, there's a lot of discussion that was inconclusive as to whether or not the booms had actually deployed all the way. We have a sensor that counts, so there's just a simple motor, and we have a sensor that counts how many times that motor rotates, and we use that to determine whether or not the booms have fully deployed.

But we had no backup way to determine that. So there was a lot of discussion as to, is this the full deployment length that was intended prior to launch? And so one of the things that we have done with LightSail 2, we've actually put marks on the beam, on the booms. And so now when we get a picture back that shows the sail deployed, you know, hopefully we'll be able to see the visual indicators on the booms to help confirm that we have a full deployment. That's one example of a lesson learned that we carried over from LightSail 1 to LightSail 2. That's a great lesson, and it goes back to the old comparison,

the analogy drawn between the deployment system on LightSail to tape measures. Now you actually have marks on the tape measures. We do. We did not mark them every millimeter, however. I think there's only three on each boom. I'm sure that'll do. What have been the big challenges getting this spacecraft ready for what is hopefully going to happen in the next few weeks? We dealt with a lot of technical challenges when we were designing LightSail 1. Things like how do we design the booms to be able to support the sails?

How do we pack the sail in? There's a lot of the harder technical design issues were already resolved by the time LightSail 1 was in orbit. So a lot of the challenges for LightSail 2 end up being more programmatic, right? Things like, are we going to make the schedule that we need to in order to deliver the spacecraft to the launch vehicle on time? Did we accurately capture all of our lessons learned? accurately capture all of our lessons learned? And have we gone through our nice test program to demonstrate that the spacecraft does indeed accurately reflect the lessons learned that we captured? There were some design iterations, as you would expect, to help apply your lessons learned, but there wasn't major redesigns. For example, I can give you one more example of a small lesson learned. One of the things we tried to do with LightSail 1 was some sort of optical and laser tracking where there's some ground sites that would point a telescope up to LightSail

and hopefully get ground confirmation that the sail deployed. The sail's really big, and it should be easily visible from a telescope from the ground. And depending on the lighting circumstance, you may even be able to see it with your naked eye at night if you hit just the right angle. Part of that is using a laser to actually drive the telescope. So you assign a very low-power laser up there, and the light bounces off the spacecraft. It's received on the ground,

and they use that to point the telescope because its telescope field of view is very narrow. And if you just point it at one spot or you didn't know exactly where the spacecraft is, you'd probably never see it. The laser ranging, that's one of the things that's called, was a little more challenging than we were anticipating in LightSell 1. So one of the changes we made for LightSell 2, they have these what's called retroreflectors, basically just like the one that would have soft-landed on the moon with Beresheet just a couple of weeks ago

if it had soft-landed. Exactly, exactly like that. So we took smaller versions, right, and we put them on part of the external surface of LightSail 2. So when it comes to doing laser ranging or laser tracking of LightSail 2, hopefully we're going to be more successful than we were with LightSail 1. But not something that I'm going to be going out there with my little green $10 laser and being able to bounce off of light sail too as it passes. No.

And I have a feeling there's some regulatory agencies that would be very upset with you if you tried that. Are you feeling pretty confident? Do you think this spacecraft is ready to do its thing and unfurl those sails and sail in the light of the sun? Absolutely. I'm excited to see it launch. I'm excited to see it demonstrate solar sailing. Well, we will wish it bon voyage and all of us will be watching

when the time comes, right from the time that Falcon Heavy lifts off from the Cape and then some number of days later when it makes it out of Prox One and that Peapod and we actually get to see light sail

actually sail in the light of the sun. Thank you, John. This has been great. Thank you very much for coming up. I really enjoyed being on your show. You guys, too. Thanks a lot. It's been wonderful being here. Thank you. In the Cal Poly SLO clean room with LightSail 2. Stay with us for an update on the spacecraft from Bruce Betts in this week's What's Up segment.

My visit with John Bilardo and his students was over, but the CubeSat Developers Workshop was still underway right across the campus. Attendees from all over our pale blue dot were listening to presentations by their colleagues and visiting scores of booths staffed by vendors, including rocket companies like Vector. I made my way to one booth

to meet yet another Cal Poly faculty member who is building tiny rocket engines that are well-suited for tiny spacecraft like CubeSats. Okay, so I am Amelia Gregg. My official title is Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Cal Poly, but I'm also a faculty advisor for the CubeSat lab. Tell me about this lovely piece of hardware which is chugging away behind us. So this is a little vacuum chamber we have currently running a demonstration of one of our micropropulsion modules we developed for CubeSats. So the thruster is called Pocket Rocket. It's actually something I started working on as a PhD student back in Australia,

and I brought it with me over here to Cal Poly. So it's an electrothermal plasma thruster, so it runs on radio frequency power. Try not to get too technical, but we inject a neutral gas like argon and use radio frequency power to turn some of it into the plasma state, which means charged particles, which are very energetic. And so they will heat up the residual neutral argon as we go through. And then so what's expelled out the back of the thruster is a hot gas,

and you get a lot of thrust out of that. And so we have the demonstration here running for the CubeSat Developers Workshop, which is on this week. And people are coming by just to check it out. It glows a beautiful purple, and so people love to see it. And I have already looked through this window into the hard vacuum, and it is absolutely lovely. We will put an image, probably one that you've taken in your lab, which is just gorgeous

looking at that glow. So I assume Argon, inert gas, noble gas, right, that is being used exactly the same way as it has been on many other spacecraft, including the Dawn spacecraft, which used xenon, argon's cousin. Yeah, it's a very similar technology to that, slightly different. The biggest spacecraft use ion thrusters where they create the plasma and then electrostatically accelerate it with electric fields. We're creating the plasma, but we're not accelerating it. We're using it to heat up a gas.

So we can get more thrust that way, but it's just, it takes a little bit more propellant to do that. You allowed me a moment ago to hold one of these little pocket rockets. What a great name. And it's only about 60 grams. We'll get a shot of this as well. And you're holding the fuel tank next to it. I am indeed, yes. So I'll just make a comment on the name first. My PhD advisor in Australia, Christine Charles, came up with the name pocket rocket. So credit where credit is due. Credit where credit is due. I think it's a great name as well. Yeah. And the little fuel tanks. So these, we just needed to find little pressurized argon gas canisters. And apparently if you're into wine, you use these things to keep wine fresh. After you open a bottle, drink half of it, you seal the rest of it up with argon rather

than air and it prevents the wine from going bad. So we bought these on Amazon for about $10 each, and we put them in our spacecraft as the propellant storage tanks. That is so fitting in other ways, because of course part of the whole idea of CubeSats, and SmallSats more broadly, is to reduce cost. The cost of getting them up there, but also the cost of building a spacecraft. Yeah, absolutely. So we make use of components like this whenever we can versus having a bunch of students design them, manufacture them in a lab for several thousand dollars a man-hour. It makes it much easier, much simpler.

Now, as you know, we at the Planetary Society, we've also dabbled a bit in CubeSat propulsion, very different, of course, from yours using the light of the sun. Why is this such a valuable line of research? So the small spacecraft industry has absolutely taken off recently. People have discovered that not only can these small satellites be used for educational purposes and just general training of next generation engineers, they can actually be really useful for science missions. So, of course, there's the light sail missions that are doing the propulsion systems. We just had Marco spacecraft go to Mars and return a picture of Mars from a small satellite as well as be part of the InSight mission.

And so people are realizing that they can do more. But to help them do more, we do need more propulsion systems on there so that can extend mission lifetimes or help them get into better locations to do more scientific missions, things like that. It, of course, used to be at one time all about making bigger and bigger rocket engines and, you know, finally climaxed with the, I guess, the F-1, that monster that drove the first stage of the Saturn V. But here we are going smaller. I would guess that your thrust is a bit less than an F-1. Just a fraction less than an F-1, yes.

But you can burn a lot longer. Yeah, we can burn a lot longer or just take little smaller fuel tanks. We don't need an entire rocket just to carry our fuel. Yeah, much less thrust, much smaller system. The small sat, again, that revolution is kind of driving miniaturizing space systems, whereas before everyone just went bigger is better, let's get more up there. Now the trend has shifted and gone, well, that's just way too expensive. So let's figure out how we can do the same mission on a smaller spacecraft. So for those who might understand the terminology, how much thrust will you get from one of these units? So this little Pukka rocket thruster that I'm holding

will do about one millinewton of thrust, which is not a very big number if you're comparing to mega newtons that say the F1 would do. But if you have a small satellite in orbit where there's very little air resistance and you're sort of in free fall, so microgravity environment, that's more than enough to start moving your satellite around in space. Obviously, there is growing enthusiasm for smallsats, cubesats. Where we're standing is great evidence of that. You just have one of the displays, one of the booths, one of many that are up here at the CubeSat Developers Workshop. You've got quite a crowd of people who've come, I assume, from all around the world. Yeah, they have. We're about 500 attendees now. And it started off as about 30 people in a room all together. And now it's about 500 attendees from all over the world. So we've got people

here from South Africa and New Zealand, Asia and Europe as well. Lots of exhibitors showing off all sorts of things. So we're not the only propulsion system here. There are a bunch of other exhibitors here that have their own propulsion systems. We have people that are selling electronics for spacecraft. We have people that are selling launch services for spacecraft. We've got the little, the small rocket companies like Vector, for example, is here showing off their capabilities now and what they're up to. You've got a lot of students here as well. Seems like a pretty exciting opportunity for them right on their own campus. Yeah, absolutely. We're very proud of the Cal Poly CubeSat lab here. There is about 70 students involved in the lab, and this is completely outside their coursework.

They don't get course credit for anything they do with us. They just do it in their spare time because we know students have so much spare time. But, yeah, about 60 of them are undergraduates. Ten of them are master's students, and they do everything in the lab day-to-day. They do lab management as well as all the technical projects from designing spacecraft all the way through to building them and operating them. What brought you to this line of work? In the smallsat world, Cal Poly has got an amazing name. It's the place where CubeSat essentially started, and it's the place that's probably been going the longest with the CubeSat program. And so when they asked if I wanted to come join them and try

to put micro propulsion systems on their CubeSats, I mean, you're not going to say no, right? No, and clearly you didn't. Good for them. I wish I had more time to explore, but I'm very glad to have the chance to talk to you because I missed you when you did a workshop down in Southern California not long ago. I look forward to hearing about some of these little pocket rockets mounted on a CubeSat or two, maybe headed across the solar system. That would be nice. Yeah, I would love to see these things on their way to Mars. Thanks very much. Of course. Thank you. Amelia Gregg of Cal Poly. Not far from Amelia's vacuum chamber was the big auditorium where nearly continuous CubeSat-related presentations were scheduled all three days.

One that caught my ear was delivered by a European attendee who is helping student teams from across the continent develop spacecraft. Hi, I'm Cristina del Castillo. I work for the Education Office of the European Space Agency. And in particular, I'm an engineer working on the Flyer Satellite Program, which offers CubeSat opportunities for university teams. Which was a revelation, at least to me, during the presentation that you just gave here at the CubeSat workshop. I had no idea that ESA had so much involvement, even to the point of having a training center where you bring together these students. Tell me how the program works.

Yes. So basically, we have a program in which we offer the student teams training opportunities and for that we have a facility in Belgium in the shape of a CDF, concurrent design facility, but it's also used as a classroom and there we offer recurrent opportunities in the form of one-week trainings, for example, and for that we invite experts from ESA to deliver lectures and we cover many topics in the form of one-week trainings, for example. And for that, we invite experts from ESA to deliver lectures, and we cover many topics in the space domain, not only those related to engineering,

but also with science, space law, concurrent design, etc. So we have that, and as well, as part of the education center, we have a CubeSat laboratory in which we have different equipment and facilities to perform environmental testing of CubeSats. And this is all available to our teams participating to the Flyer Satellite Program. They can come for free and test their satellites as part of the program. But they also receive complementary training in the form of lectures so that they are better prepared to face those phases of the program. This is a wonderful program. Is this something that is as central to ESA's mission

as the other work that it does that we're more familiar with? Yeah, so basically education is covered in the ESA convention and it's a mandatory activity and there's a lot of importance that is being placed into the education part. It is apparently open to all of the nations that participate in ESA plus a couple more? Yeah, the opportunities are open to all the ESA students from all ESA member states and Slovenia and Canada. Obviously not every team that hopes to launch a CubeSat, put it in low Earth orbit, is going to be successful. But you had a great slide that had several examples of teams that I assume have been successful. Can you mention two or three of those? Yes.

So those teams that I have presented here are still being developed. They have not been yet launched. But we have had a previous cycle in which we launched three CubeSat teams from French Guyana together with Sentinel-1B. And we have also had one team launch from the ISS. And in the past, we were part of the Vega maiden flight, and we launched seven CubeSats there. What have some of these CubeSats had as their mission? Because they're not just going up to radio, yes, I'm up here. They're actually doing science or doing engineering research.

Yeah, so the teams that we have in this current cycle, some of them want to perform Earth observation missions, for example, through the use of GNSSR techniques or L-band radiometers. Other teams, they want to monitor the LEO radiation environment. Others want to, for example, test miniaturized gamma ray burst detector. So these are all both scientific and technical missions, but we also have a team which is developing an ADS-B compact receiver, a team that is developing a test. They want to test an LED-based payload. LEDs, something that will blink as it orbits? Yes, exactly.

It's basically a CubeSat that will flash a LED pattern to allow ground stations to track their path through the sky when the payload is on. Like a lighthouse on orbit. Sort of, yes. It's very exciting stuff. Do you, in your work, get to work directly with these student teams? Yes.

In fact, we have had just a couple of weeks before this workshop in California. We had our own workshop in which we offered them lectures so that they were better prepared for the environmental tests in their CubeSat mission. in their Q-Test admissions, so we offer a combined set of lectures offered by ESA specialists and then practical demonstrations in our lab so that they better understand what they are going to face when they test their own Q-Test admissions. What we have heard from everyone at all of these school-based programs is that the hands-on experience that they gain through programs like this is absolutely invaluable. Yes, in fact, we have seen many students who have later gone to industry and they feel much better prepared to face and tackle the everyday life in industry thanks to the preparation that has been given, for example,

by getting them acquainted with the standards and the space project life cycle, best practices, and so on. So once they exit from our program, they are better prepared to do their job in the space industry. No doubt. Best of luck to all of your current teams. May they all reach at least low Earth orbit and perhaps at some point beyond. And thank you very much for a great presentation and for taking a couple of minutes right now.

Thanks so much to you for your time. Cristina del Castillo of the European Space Agency. With all the students attending this year's CubeSat Developers Workshop, I really had to speak with at least one of them. On a table belonging to Moorhead State University was an impressive six-unit CubeSat. It was 10 by 20 by 30 centimeters. Behind that table was one of the students who helped build it. Hi, I'm Emily Maddell, and I'm an undergraduate student just finishing up my sophomore year at Moorhead State University.

I'm majoring in space systems engineering, and I'm really excited to be talking about the projects that we're working on. Is this your first CubeSat workshop? Yes, this is the first time that I've been to CubeSat. Moorhead usually brings students every year to CubeSat. We play a pretty big role in CubeSats as we work with and develop all different sizes, and we've flown about seven missions so far. But I bet none of those yet have left Earth orbit. No, they have been all LEO right now. Our upcoming mission is going to be beyond the Earth's orbit.

And we have a really cool 3D-printed model of it right here. Tell us about this. Yeah, so the 3D-printed model that we have in front of us is our mission Lunar Ice Cube. And this is a 6U CubeSat that is going to launch on NASA's EM-1. And we're going to be riding along with 12 other CubeSats that were selected. And we're going to do a flyby of the moon and then eventually catch in the moon's orbit and look for water ice. EM-1, meaning that you will be on the first flight of the Space Launch System, that big rocket. Yeah, that's the one. I think it stands for Exploration Mission 1?

Yes, I believe so. All right, so you're going to have lots of company. I don't know who else is going to the moon with you of those other secondary payloads. But this is a very impressive package. It's what we would call a six-unit CubeSat, right? Yes, yep, a six-unit CubeSat, 2U by 3U length and width, and so it's about 30 centimeters long and 20 centimeters wide.

And you have, I mean, they're not actually attached to the spacecraft, but I assume that these big panels simulate where it'll be getting its power? Yes, so the big panels that we have on the side, which are not attached to the model currently for travel and ease of setup, but this is a pretty to-scale model of the size of the solar panels that we're going to be using.

What will be your instruments, and I assume also a camera, that you'll use to do this work above the moon? We're going to be using an infrared spectrometer payload. It's a Birches instrument that we're getting from NASA JPL, and that'll do all of our science work, and we're sourcing a lot of our other subsystems from partnerships as well. So looking for water on the moon, this is a pretty hot topic, and not just for colleges and students like yourself, right? Right. This is actually part

of NASA's Lunar Gateway Initiative. We're working with other payloads as well to kind of map out certain resources on the moon so that we can use that in further exploration in the future. I got to tell you what I've told other undergraduates, students in the past, that in my day, we didn't get to build spacecraft. Yeah, I believe that. It's come a long way really fast. What kind of experience is this for you? I mean, it just seems like an invaluable experience. Yeah, it's really incredible. At Moorhead, we get undergraduates through our graduate program and up to our faculty and staff, all hands on deck for building our projects.

And this has been a really big experience for a lot of us. I personally am just getting into the hardware side of things with Lunar Ice Cube as well. But a lot of our students have been there since the start of all of the development and watched it grow, and we're getting in parts now to do our assembly integration and testing. Do you interact with other colleges and now even high schools that are building CubeSats? I mean, it's quite a community. Yeah, it certainly is. We've reached out, and especially our faculty who have been around for a while and know the community really well.

And we've integrated in with a lot of companies and we've had other partnerships in the past as well with universities and things. So where will you be when that big rocket lifts off with your CubeSat for the moon? If everything goes according to plan and the launch date doesn't change, we're looking right now to launch in 2020. So I'll still be going to school at Moorhead at that point. So I'll see through probably the end of the mission at least, not through its completion, but through that launch, as long as that doesn't change from now. I would love to check in again in, well, a year and a half,

whenever that big rocket takes off. I hope you make it to the Cape. That should be quite a launch year and a half, whenever that big rocket takes off. I hope you make it to the Cape. That should be quite a launch to watch. Yeah, I'm sure it will be. Thanks so much. Thank you. You can see pictures of my clean room visit with LightSail 2 and shots of this year's CubeSat Developers Workshop on this week's episode page. It's at planetary.org slash radio.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He's back to tell us about the night sky. He's got, I assume, a new space trivia contest for us. But we want to start with a little update on light sails, since he manages that project for the Planetary Society, one of his many duties as chief scientist. There have been some developments, even since I visited the spacecraft, as people heard in the clean room at Cal Poly just a couple of weeks ago.

What's up? What's the latest? It's true. You will be one of the last people to ever have seen LightSail 2. Oh, heavy sigh. No, it's a good thing. It's fulfilling its destiny. It's moved on from Cal Poly. Ryan Nugent of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo flew it down to Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it has now been reintegrated into the Georgia Tech Prox-1

spacecraft. It's home for a launch and a week after launch. And in a couple weeks, it should be moving off to Florida. That is terrific news. And hopefully we will all be following it to Florida before long. Any more word about when the launch of the next Falcon Heavy with light sail might happen? According to NASA, who has other things on this rocket, According to NASA, who has other things on this rocket, no earlier than June 22nd. Good enough. I hope to see you there. What else are we going to see but up in the night sky?

Well, in the evening sky, you'll see Mars still hanging on in the west, looking reddish. Check out a constellation. If you want to find Leo in the early evening, if you're in the northern hemisphere, look pretty much right overhead and it looks kind of like a lion lying down. If you have trouble finding it, go to the Big Dipper and the two stars that point to the North Star. Go the other direction and you will end up at Leo, Leo's brightest star being Regulus. And you will end up at Leo, Leo's brightest star being Regulus. In the pre-dawn sky, we've got Venus, but it's tough. It's super bright, but it's low in the east.

And then Jupiter coming up in the late evening now in the east, looking very bright. And it will be hanging out next to a quite full, not completely full moon on the 20th. And then coming up around middle of the night is Saturn looking yellowish low in the east. That'll keep us occupied. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1963 that Faith 7 flew the last Mercury mission with Gordon Cooper on board. It's like the seven dwarves. You can never remember all the names. It's always Faith 7 that I forget, along with Sneezy. It represented the first sneezing in space. No, no, it didn't. 1969, Apollo 10 was launched on its way to almost land on the moon in an intentional dry run without landing. And here I just came back from Oklahoma. People will be hearing some of the stuff that we recorded there at Science Museum Oklahoma before too many weeks go by. The home state of General Tom

Stafford, the commander of that mission. It's all Oklahoman week because Gordon Cooper, also from Oklahoma. Yeah, that's right. We move on to Random Space Fact. Little LightSail 2 trivia for you. magnetotorkers along three perpendicular axes that are used to adjust the spacecraft's orientation to the Earth's magnetic field by applying magnetic field, basically electromagnets. It also has a momentum wheel spinning around for larger, bigger, faster turns in one axis tied to our solar sailing plants. You know, nothing against these momentum wheels, but that is just so cool,

the concept of using the Earth's magnetic field to orient your spacecraft. What could be cooler? Ice cream. All right, I'll buy that. All right. We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you what comet's debris

is responsible for the Eta Aquarids meteor shower, which we just had a couple weeks ago. How'd we do, Matt? Very good response. And maybe because this is the comet that if you ask anybody, name a comet, this is the one they're going to name. Cherymov-Cherysemenko. I mean, that's what I would answer. No, I was thinking of Kahootek, but okay.

It's not either of those. I was thinking of Kahootek, but okay. As a close second or third, what is that comet that's responsible? Halley, Comet Halley. Heard of that, right? I have, faintly, yeah. And hopefully we'll see it more than faintly when it returns, although I'm not sure I'll have the chance. We have some listeners who are hoping that you and I will still be doing planetary radio when the time will come during what's up to say, watch for Halley's Comet. In what year do you have that handy? No, but I believe it's 2061. That's what everybody else has said here. So yeah. You're probably right. You're just testing me. You're probably right. You're just testing me.

Start living healthy. Our winner this week, William Lee Calve in Martinez, Georgia. He actually won a couple of years ago, not quite two years ago. It was the last time he picked this up. So congratulations. We are going to send you, Billy or William, a 200-point itelescope.net account. Billy or William, a 200-point itelescope.net account, and of course, a Planetary Society kick asteroid, rubber asteroid. As you might expect, I got some other good stuff here. Craig Balog in Boonton, New Jersey. If you were wondering where in the solar system Halley's Comet is currently located, that'd be outside the orbit of Neptune, not too far from its aphelion point of approximately

35.3 AU astronomical units. Andres in Columbia. Oh, he's one of those who said, let's hope the planetary radio is still on next time Halley's Comet returns close to Earth in 2061. Robert Laporta, Avon, Connecticut, both the Eta Aquarid and the Orionids, I think that's better, meteor showers are thought to be the result of debris from the comet. 2061, he'll be 109. He's looking forward to it. And finally, this, not from our usual poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, but another David, David Douthat in Charlestown, West Virginia. The Eta Aquarid meteor shower sends dozens of shooting stars per hour firing above every mountain and valley. And all of them started with Comet Halley.

We're ready for another one. Recently, the Japanese Hayabusa 2 spacecraft fired a copper projectile at high speeds into Ryugu, the asteroid. Here's your question about how wide an area was observed to have changed due to the Hayabusa 2 SCI impact into Ryugu. How wide an area? Approximately, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Shouldn't be too hard to find. There are pictures of this. You need to get us those answers, though, by Wednesday, May 22nd at 8 a.m. Pacific time.

That's it. May I just say, well, we were still on stage when we did this. I had a great time with you at the Planetary Defense Conference, and I hope people enjoyed the panel discussion from that and our What's Up in last week's episode. Yeah, no, it was fun. Thank you, as always. It was a good time.

You can also check it out on livestream. They've got a not live recorded version of it. And we'll put a link to that on this week's episode page that you can find at planetary.org slash radio. You can hear the whole event. That would include Bill Nye's presentation and also NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green. Okay, we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky,

and think about rubber asteroids pelting you in the head. Thank you, and good night. Just as Bruce attempted to pelt a few people at the Planetary Defense Conference with those rubber asteroids, he is Bruce Betts, the chief scientist and he's got the better throwing arm at the Planetary Society.

He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by our Cubist members. Mary Liz Benders, our associate producer, Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra.