Cal Poly students at the school's CubeSat Laboratory launched a miniature satellite named SAL-E from the Vandenberg Space Force Base last week.
Mission lead and aerospace engineering student Kayla Wong says the lab hasn't launched a satellite in five years, in part, because of the COVID pandemic.
“That knowledge gap just left a lot of students unsure exactly of how to move forward,” Wong said. “SAL-E was created… just to get us back on our feet and prove that we can essentially launch a mission again.”
Cal Poly students also designed SAL-E’s two payloads. One collects information for research on radiation’s impact on data, and the other tests a long-range radio device.
Students at the CubeSat Laboratory are currently monitoring the satellite as it’s orbiting the earth, often staying up until 3 a.m. to make contact.
Akshay Sathish is the ground operations lead for the project.
“The satellite does an orbit around earth every roughly 90 minutes, but since the earth is rotating underneath the satellite, it doesn't always come over California,” Sathish said.
Sathish says the two to three times a day that it does pass overhead, the team uploads and downloads data to the satellite.
He says that in order for that communication to happen, “a multitude of things had to go right in a very specific order.”
He says that over 300 people have worked on the mission at some point.
Wong says at first, they were able to contact SAL-E, but they weren’t able to get anything back.
“I think it was three days after the launch where we were able to establish two-way communication,” Wong said, adding that was right after the launch of Artemis II, a NASA lunar flyby mission.
“So it was a very exciting afternoon,” Wong said, laughing.
Students will continue to monitor SAL-E for the next several weeks. Wong estimates the satellite will deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere in three years, after she’s graduated from Cal Poly.
