A team of about 20 BU students are designing a small satellite called BUSAT, the Boston University Satellite for Applications and student Training. It is part of a competition sponsored by the US Air Force known as the University Nanosat Program (UNP). The BUSAT satellite project has been a part of two cycles of this competition, UNP5 and now UNP7. In each cycle, the Air Force accepts proposals from universities to design and fabricate a small satellite in competition with ten other universities. In each cycle BU received $110K over two years. The hardware costs and procurements for BUSAT have been supported by this grant.
The students on the BUSAT team, with the help of their advisor CAS Professor of Astronomy Ted Fritz, have submitted proposals for two NASA provided opportunities. The first of these was a high altitude balloon program known as HASP, which is administered by the Louisiana Space Grant through LSU (http://laspace.lsu.edu/hasp/). These proposals are competitively evaluated, and the BU proposal was selected permitting the team to fly a portion of the BUSAT data system to the edge of space.
Once selected as a HASP participant, student teams are not charged for the flight. However, student teams must provide their own funding to support payload development and integration and there are a few document “deliverables” that the teams must supply. This has successfully occurred during the summer with two of the BUSAT students traveling to Palestine, TX, to qualify the BU payload and integrate it onto the “space test platform” gondola that the balloon will carry aloft. The actual flight occurred from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) base in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, during the last week of August, and three of the BUSAT students participated in the launch.
The second of these NASA-provided proposal opportunities is permitting seven of the BUSAT students to participate in a series of NASA airplane flights that provide a zero g environment. Quoting from their web site: “This year NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program has selected 24 cutting-edge space technology payloads for flights on commercial reusable launch vehicles, balloons and a commercial parabolic aircraft. Sixteen of the payloads will ride on parabolic aircraft flights, which provide brief periods of weightlessness…”. The BUSAT proposal was entitled the “Boston University Student Proposal for Deployable Solar and Antenna Array Microgravity Testing,” and Profesor Fritz is the Principal Investigator (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/mar/HQ_12-089_Experimental_Payloads_Flight_Opportunities.html).
These flights will be used to test a solar panel deployment system that one of the Mechanical Engineering senior design teams developed during the past academic year for BUSAT. Once again the selected student teams are not charged for the flight. However, student teams must provide their own funding to support payload development and integration and there are also a few document “deliverables” that the teams must supply as well. These flights are occurring this week for the BUSAT team from Houston, TX and a portion of the BUSAT satellite structure has been fabricated and will fly multiple times.
A team of four of the BUSAT students has supported a Proto-Qualification Review required by the Air Force that was held in conjunction with the Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah (http://www.smallsat.org/) recently. The BUSAT team was required to present a 20 minute overview of the BUSAT project and then to man a booth for the duration of the conference. The students were then interviewed by the Air Force review team of about 30 persons about various aspects of the project during the week of the conference.