Being a student can pose quite the challenge when you want to do something as cool as putting a satellite into orbit. You’ll probably have to make a few cutbacks, so take a page out of Brown Space Engineering’s book. They made a great 3U CubeSat for around $2000!
A few weeks back, ipXchange had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Dan, JB, Milan, Colden, Siddharta, and Tanish from Brown Space Engineering, the space engineering club from Brown University, if that wasn’t clear.
In this ProjeX interview – with the most people we’ve ever hosted – Eamon discovers how Brown Space Engineering came to be and the challenges of building a 3U cube satellite for testing perovskite solar cells in space, on a comparably tiny budget.
Watching this interview, you’ll learn:
- The system architecture of Brown Space Engineering’s latest CubeSat
- How a student team puts such a device into orbit and how long it lasts
- How the CubeSat is controlled from Earth and how it orients itself in zero gravity
- How to build a useful, fully working device on around 1% the budget of the industry standard – a Sun sensor array for satellite orientation, for example, costs >$60k, but Brown Space Engineering created a magnetometer-based solution for around $300.
- And much more…
Keep up to date with Brown Space Engineering’s progress on their official website and if you’re a manufacturer who wants to give a budding team a chance to test your technology for an out-of-this-world case study, get in contact by e-mailing bse@brown.edu.
If you’re working on a similar project for a commercial application, check out some of the (aero)space-related solutions that ipXchange has written about by clicking here.
We truly hope you enjoyed this in-depth chat about saving budget in the most extreme circumstances as a student engineer. Let us know if you’ve got a project that you think we should cover in another discussion, and as always…
Keep designing!
Love space tech? Check out these other CubeSat pieces from ipXchange and our community:
Satellites in IoT: Unlocking the Potential of Space-Based Communication
1% the unit cost for small-scale space missions, with zero debris: Personal Satellite