Have a news item you would like featured? Fill out the request here (UW NetID Restricted).
-
Washington's first student-built satellite preparing for launch
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Team members Paige Northway, Anika Hidayat, John Correy and Eli Reed (back row, left to right) watch in June as Henry Martin of Nanoracks does a “fit test” to ensure that the satellite fits inside the silver box. The digital clock on the wall counts down the days, minutes and seconds until launch.Dennis Wise/University of Washington
A University of Washington satellite smaller than a loaf of bread will, if all goes well, launch this weekend on its way to low-Earth orbit. It will be the first student-built satellite from Washington state to go into space.
HuskySat-1 is one of seven student-built satellites from around the country scheduled to launch at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time Saturday, Nov. 2, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast.
HuskySat-1 sits under protection in the UW satellite lab in June, as it prepared to leave on its journey to Virginia and then to low-Earth orbit.Dennis Wise/University of Washington
“It will be exciting once it’s in orbit,”said
HuskySat-1’s last moments on Earth will be broadcast live on NASA TV. The satellites are hitching a ride on the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, whose first stop will be the International Space Station to resupply astronauts and swap out materials. In early 2020 the spacecraft will leave the station and fly up to an altitude of about 310 miles (500 kilometers), where a NASA engineer will eject the student-build satellites.
An earlier model of the satellite, shown here in the lab, had solar panels on wings that unfold. The final model has solar panels attached on three sides to provide electrical power.Dennis Wise/University of Washington
The UW creation is a type of CubeSat, a small satellite that measures exactly 10 centimeters (about 3 inches) along each side. HuskySat-1 is a “three-unit” system, meaning it’s the shape of a stack of three CubeSat-sized blocks. These miniature satellites were first created as a way for engineering students to test software with smaller, cheaper devices they could build from start to finish in a few years. But the devices are growing in popularity, with Planet and other companies now using nanosatellites for commercial ventures.
NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative helps students and nonprofit groups launch these instrument systems into space. The Washington State University satellite, CougSat-1, is scheduled to launch in October 2020.
The UW satellite weighs just under 7 pounds (3.14 kilograms) and took five years to design and build. Undergraduate and graduate students from aeronautics and astronautics, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, Earth and space sciences, physics and other departments spent hundreds of hours building the system in the Husky Satellite Lab.
Its trip into low-Earth orbit is organized by Nanoracks, a Texas company that, like Spaceflight Industries of Seattle and other businesses, coordinates smaller groups to provide access to launch vehicles.
After extensive testing and final checkouts this summer, Northway hand-delivered the satellite in September to the Nanoracks facility in Houston, where it was placed into the box that will carry it to space.
“These students have gained firsthand experience on what is required to build and launch a satellite, and aerospace companies have already snapped up many of them,” said Robert Winglee, a professor of Earth and space sciences and the team’s faculty adviser as director of the UW Advanced Propulsion Lab. “Meanwhile, the UW is making its first steps to a continuing hardware presence in space. What more could you wish for?”
Three antennas installed on the roof of Johnson Hall will allow students to get information like position and altitude and send instructions to the satellite as it passes overhead. A camera built in collaboration with students at Raisbeck Aviation High School in Tukwila, Washington, will send back grainy, black-and-white photos of Earth. Students will also be able to control the satellite’s camera and thruster remotely.
“A lot of information is taught in classes, but only in a hands-on environment can you experience things like design, integration of subsystems, project management and documentation,” said team member Anika Hidayat, a senior in mechanical engineering.
HuskySat-1 will orbit at an angle of 51.6 degrees, traveling between 51.6 degrees north and south, at an altitude of 310 miles (500 kilometers) and at more than 4 miles (7 kilometers) per second. Once the students locate their satellite they will be able to predict its travel path.
White lines show the satellite’s projected travel path, orbiting at an angle of 51.6 degrees from the equator. The antennas at the UW will be able to communicate with HuskySat-1 when it flies inside the red circle.Paige Northway/University of Washington
Some of the student-built parts will still be in test mode. A custom-built thruster uses sparks to vaporize small amounts of solid sulfur as a propellant. The thruster will fire about 100 times as the satellite passes over Seattle, only enough thrust to provide a slight nudge. A high-bandwidth communications system built by former graduate student Paul Sturmer, now at Blue Origin, transmits at 24 Gigahertz, allowing the satellite to quickly send reams of data. That system will send down a test packet from space.
“Usually people buy most of the satellite and build one part of it. We built all the parts,” Northway said. “It was a pretty serious undertaking.”
“Space odyssey: UW, WSU students building tiny, Kleenex-size satellites” Seattle Times - May 2017
Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT) page
HuskySat-1 in the international nanosats database
The UW group will control HuskySat-1 for three months. In the spring it will transfer ownership and responsibility to AMSAT, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, which provided the main communication system. The satellite will begin to lose altitude in about three years and will burn up as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. (NASA requires that all such objects deorbit within 25 years.)
HuskySat-1 grew out of a special topics course in the UW Department of Earth & Space Sciences. In 2016 members formed a registered student organization, the Husky Satellite Lab at UW.
“Being involved with this has taught me a lot,” said current team captain John Correy, a UW graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics. “But beyond that, it’s just validation that I’m in the right industry.”
As the Husky Satellite Lab wraps up this half-decade-long effort it plans to next tackle a NanoLab project-- a partly prebuilt system that can be adapted to conduct experiments in microgravity -- for travel aboard a Blue Origin vehicle. Students plan to complete that project by spring of 2020.
HuskySat-1 was supported by a NASA Undergraduate Student Instrument Project award, which funded the satellite’s development and launch with a private space contractor. The team also was supported by NASA, the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, the UW and several companies that provided equipment for the satellite and antenna.
For more information, contact Northway at northway@uw.edu or Winglee at winglee@uw.edu. Learn more at www.uwsatellite.com.
Read More -
Rediscovery of old sediment from beneath the Greenland ice sheet
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Rare samples of ice & sediment from beneath the Greenland ice sheet, recently rediscovered after nearly 30 years in freezers in Copenhagen, are the subject of a new study involving ESS's Eric Steig. Read More -
Can regenerative agriculture reverse climate change? Big Food is banking on it | NBC News
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Regenerative agriculture works to draw carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil, but there's an ongoing debate on how much carbon can be stored there and for how long. David Montgomery, professor of Earth and space sciences at the UW, is quoted. Read More -
An atmospheric mystery: Scientist tracks the unusual superbolts lightning over oceans
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Robert Holzworth a professor at the UW department of earth and space sciences and director of the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN), has been tracking lightning for about two decades. A recent study led by Holzworth shows the location and timing of superbolts, big strikes of lightning that release more than one million joules of electrical power — a thousand times more than the average stroke energy. Read More -
WWLLN and Superbolts in the NewYorkTimes
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Science story about our (WWLLN) recent JGR paper regarding superbolts, which are lightning strokes which are more than 3 orders higher in energy than the mean. Read More -
New insights into the geodynamics of the India-Asia collision
Friday, September 13, 2019
The collision between India and Asia, one of the most dramatic tectonic events of the last 100 million years, could have had a more complex history than we thought. Learn more about this from the work of the research team led by ESS Assistant Professor Alexis Licht in Myanmar, featured this week in an article in Nature Geoscience. Read More -
Lightning 'superbolts' form over oceans from November to February
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
The lightning season in the Southeastern U.S. is almost finished for this year, but the peak season for the most powerful strokes of lightning won’t begin until November, according to a newly published global survey of these rare events.
A University of Washington study maps the location and timing of “superbolts” -- bolts that release electrical energy of more than 1 million Joules, or a thousand times more energy than the average lightning bolt, in the very low frequency range in which lightning is most active. Results show that superbolts tend to hit the Earth in a fundamentally different pattern from regular lightning, for reasons that are not yet fully understood.
The study was published Sept. 9 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
“It’s very unexpected and unusual where and when the very big strokes occur,” said lead author Robert Holzworth, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences who has been tracking lightning for almost two decades.
Holzworth manages the World Wide Lightning Location Network, a UW-managed research consortium that operates about 100 lightning detection stations around the world, from Antarctica to northern Finland. By seeing precisely when lightning reaches three or more different stations, the network can compare the readings to determine a lightning bolt’s size and location.
The network has operated since the early 2000s. For the new study, the researchers looked at 2 billion lightning strokes recorded between 2010 and 2018. Some 8,000 events -- one in 250,000 strokes, or less than a thousandth of a percent -- were confirmed superbolts.
“Until the last couple of years, we didn’t have enough data to do this kind of study,” Holzworth said.
The authors compared their network’s data against lightning observations from the Maryland-based company Earth Networks and from the New Zealand MetService.
The new paper shows that superbolts are most common in the Mediterranean Sea, the northeast Atlantic and over the Andes, with lesser hotspots east of Japan, in the tropical oceans and off the tip of South Africa. Unlike regular lightning, the superbolts tend to strike over water.
“Ninety percent of lightning strikes occur over land,” Holzworth said. “But superbolts happen mostly over the water going right up to the coast. In fact, in the northeast Atlantic Ocean you can see Spain and England’s coasts nicely outlined in the maps of superbolt distribution.”
“The average stroke energy over water is greater than the average stroke energy over land -- we knew that,” Holzworth said. “But that’s for the typical energy levels. We were not expecting this dramatic difference.”
The time of year for superbolts also doesn’t follow the rules for typical lightning. Regular lightning hits in the summertime -- the three major so-called “lightning chimneys” for regular bolts coincide with summer thunderstorms over the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. But superbolts, which are more common in the Northern Hemisphere, strike both hemispheres between the months of November and February.
The reason for the pattern is still mysterious. Some years have many more superbolts than others: late 2013 was an all-time high, and late 2014 was the next highest, with other years having far fewer events.
“We think it could be related to sunspots or cosmic rays, but we’re leaving that as stimulation for future research,” Holzworth said. “For now, we are showing that this previously unknown pattern exists.”
Co-authors are research associate professor Michael McCarthy and senior research scientist Abram Jacobson at the UW; and James Brundell and Craig Rodger at the University of Otago in New Zealand. The research was funded by the UW.
For more information, contact Holzworth at bobholz@uw.edu or 206-685-7410.
Read More -
UW scientists track newly-discovered lightning 'superbolts' | KOMO
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
University of Washington researchers have been studying a relatively newly discovered phenomenon where thunderstorms can occasionally put out a super-charged bolt that releases about 1,000 times more energy than a typical lightning strike. Robert Holzworth, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, is quoted. Read More -
Last day of the dinosaurs' reign captured in stunning detail | National Geographic
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Rocks from deep inside the Chicxulub impact crater show what happened in the minutes to hours after one of our planet's most catastrophic events. Jody Bourgeois, professor emeritus of Earth and space sciences at the UW, is quoted. Read More -
Solving the mystery of the Moses Coulee canyon to be discussed in Kennewick | Tri City Herald
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
The mystery of Washington state's Moses Coulee canyon will be discussed at a free lecture Sept. 10 in Kennewick. Joel Gombiner, a graduate student in Earth and space sciences at the UW, is quoted. Read More
