Santa Clara engineering project reaches outer space

By Rachel Schwartz

Mission controls for GeneSat-1, a 10-pound satellite and the first NASA mission operated by a student-based team, were handed over to the School of Engineering Wednesday.

The result of a three-year program that teamed local universities with NASA, GeneSat-1 will be monitored and experimented on by Santa Clara engineering majors in the Bannan Robotics Lab for the next 10 months.

"The cool thing is that in 90 minutes, it goes around the earth once," senior Phelps Williams said. "You're sitting there at 2 a.m., and you're listening to something that's 400 kilometers above your head, and it's going over places that you'll never see. You compare that to other things in your life that take 90 minutes, and it's pretty awesome."

The GeneSat-1 satellite was launched into space on Dec. 16, 2006, from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia via an Air Force Minotaur rocket designed to launch payloads into orbit.

Students from Santa Clara have been involved in its mission control since the launch, working on campus or at NASA Ames Research Center.

Graduate students Ignacio Mas and Mike Rasay, both of whom have been involved with the project for over two years, and Williams, who joined the project shortly before launch, gathered at the SRI satellite dish at Stanford University -- which is used to communicate with the satellite at 4 a.m. the day of the launch -- to watch a live feed from Virginia.

Their celebration was short; as soon as the satellite launched they had to prepare for its first transmissions.

"Within 90 minutes after launch we were able to tune in on the frequency of the satellite, and it was kind of faint, but the fact that we could hear anything at all was very gratifying," Williams said.

Santa Clara students took over mission control shortly after the launch and have been in charge of the day-to-day communication with the satellite, which they do from the robotics laboratory inside Bannan Engineering or the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

Students from California Polytechnic University, Stanford University and Santa Clara helped design the shoebox-sized satellite, write the programs that track and communicate with the orbiting satellite and develop experiments determining the effects of space on biological organisms.

Inside the 10-pound satellite is a miniature laboratory in which E. coli samples were grown to study the effects of microgravity on their metabolism.

The primary experiments were expected to take between four and six months, but the mission was so successful in its first two months that all of the experiments have already been completed.

The team plans to spend the next 10 months experimenting with software designed by Rasay that helps diagnose problems on satellites.

The satellite was designed to orbit for one year before burning up upon re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.

"Somewhere over Earth there will be a streak in the sky, and it will be over," Williams said.

The satellite was designed to piggy-back on top of an existing rocket launch, which cut costs significantly. The GeneSat-1 project has cost NASA $8 million.

GeneSat-1 hitched a ride on an Air Force tactical satellite, the primary mission of the December launch.

Getting hands-on experience working on an actual space mission has been rewarding for the students involved; satellite hardware and software design is usually conceptual at this point in their education, said Williams.

Engineering students have maintained almost-daily contact with the satellite during short windows of time when it passes over the Palo Alto foothills, where the Stanford SRI dish receives signals.

"The first few days of the mission, we were running contacts at three, four in the morning, so we'd have to wake up at two and go to work," Mas said.

The students were nervous during the initial days of the mission because of the complex procedures necessary to communicate with the satellite, but as the mission progressed, the procedures became routine, said Rasay.

"Now that we've been operating for two months, those procedures have become fairly straightforward to us," Rasay said.

Rasay, Mas and Williams keep one eye on the GeneSat-1 as it passes over each day, and they already have the other one looking toward future projects.

GeneSat-2 is already in the works and PharmaSat, a similar but larger project, is expected to launch within the next year.

Contact Rachel Schwartz at (408) 554-4546 or rschwartz@scu.edu.