Radio sound: T-minus 10 minutes and counting.
Verify T-minus 10 minute limit checks a go.
James Lumpp: For them to find they can actually work on developing spacecraft and developing
payloads that go up on the space station, captures that, that child in all of us.
Every kid is interested in dinosaurs and space.
Mary Fralick: I have always been really interested in aerospace, anything to do with airplanes,
anything going into space, has always really excited me.
Then once I started I learned about the KySat-2 project, and how exciting that was to be involved
in something like a satellite actually going into orbit while I was still in school and
I thought that was an amazing opportunity.
Alex Clements: With KySat-2, almost all of the hardware was designed and built in-house.
Morehead State designed the electrical power system, UK worked on the command and data
handling system, the frame, structure, and then the camera system onboard.
Mary Fralick: The satellite sends beacons, every 15 seconds.
It will tell us that it's on, it will tell us what's working, what's powered on, what's
powered off.
Ground stations all over the world can pick up that kind of data and send it to us.
Jason Rexroat: We've collected 30 or 40 here and then we're getting emails every day from
ham radio users in Russia, Japan, Argentina.
Mary Fralick: So now we can start giving it commands telling it to turn things on and
off or take a picture.
Jason Rexroat: Eventually we'll be getting pictures down and we'll also be collecting
sensor data showing the strength of the earth's magnetic field.
We expect to get about a year, a year and a half of data out of it before the batteries
have degraded so much that they're not really useable.
Then the satellite itself will most likely reenter the atmosphere and burn up after around
2 years just from the orbit it's in.
It's a 500-kilometer orbit, so it's higher than the International Space Station.
But its still considered low earth orbit.
James Lumpp: NASA is always engineering in the extreme where the missions are very high
profile, a lot of press, a lot of exposure, a lot of people see your failures very dramatically
if something doesn't work.
You have to get things right, so the processes are very proven, very effective.
So for the students to learn those techniques and those processes wherever they go and work
and whatever types of systems and projects they work on in the future, having that ability
they have to apply that rigorous process of the design and review and getting things right
and double checking everything I think is going to help them in anything they do in
the future.
Jason Rexroat: On the inside it has a custom avionics system, so I was in charge of the
senior design group during my senior year of college to build that system.
So we completely designed the circuit board, we picked out all the little processors, we
populated it, soldered it all together and then wrote all the program code for it.
So it was very much an in-house, kind of flight computer that we built.
Alex Clements: I was very involved with designing some of the 3-D printed parts.
The Space Systems Lab actually has two 3-D printers.
We iterated on a part, a very small part for the camera system.
I think went through 4 or 5 iterations in an afternoon, Mary and myself working on that
part, getting the sizing right.
Jason Rexroat: There's a definite volume challenge, you're trying to fit a certain number of circuit
boards or batteries or radios or whatever in a very small space.
It's also difficult from a mass perspective, just because you are trying to get in under
the exact weight that you need, so it turns into a pretty dense system pretty quickly
and you have to be careful with that.
Alex Clements: Some of the satellites that the government launches or bigger companies
launch are the size of a school bus and we're fitting the same systems into one that's 4
inches cubed, so that's definitely a challenge.
Mary Fralick: I would say the most challenging part was the timeline, we were given a year
before launch, to have a satellite built from the ground up, and be ready to be inserted
into the rocket and be deployed.
So that was quite a challenge, getting everyone to work together, working with Morehead State
and Kentucky Space, but I think that we beyond succeeded our goal.
Radio sound: CM go for launch, copy that CM, check step 101.
Jason Rexroat: I guess in class we solve circuit problems with no real end goal other than
to get the homework grade or get a good grade on the test.
With this, the test was actually getting to fly in orbit.
There's a lot more riding on whether or not that's correct.
Alex Clements: You have to be very confident in your numbers, your design, your testing,
so pulling that all together was a very important part for all of us to take that theoretical
stuff you learned in the classroom and put it into a real world experience.
Jason Rexroat: The most exciting moment was launch.
I was at Wallops flight facility last week, sitting in the grass at night watching that
rocket go up.
It was a really cool moment just knowing that we'd made it, that we'd made it past NASA's
stringent testing requirements, that we'd built it and it worked.
Mary Fralick: And then, the first time it passes over, when you hear, "oh yes, she's
on, she's working!"
That was probably the most fulfilling moment.
Jason Rexroat: everyone on a team has different you know design goals so you kind of have
to synthesize all that into a final realization, a final system that will work.
That's the part that I really enjoyed, taking the design and translating it from us describing
or drawing on a whiteboard to an actual circuit board or to an actual satellite that works.
Mary Fralick: My biggest takeaway is that, working with a team, you can really accomplish
anything.
We've had some fantastic students on our team, a lot of help from Morehead State and from
Kentucky Space, and working with those different organizations and also the students in the
lab here, I mean what the students are capable of is truly impressive.