NASA tests satellite systems developed by Mexican university students

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – NASA tested in a suborbital flight (maximum altitude of 100 kilometers) devices created by Mexican researchers that are key to constructing a type of nanosatellite, informed UNAM on Monday.

Members of the academic community from both the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) participated in creating components together with national and international institutions for this second test, the university said in a bulletin.

The flight took place on June 8 to study the ionosphere, which is the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere between 80 and 500 kilometers above sea level.

Rafael Prieto Meléndez, an academic technician at the Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology (ICAT) and leader of the team at UNAM, said that the Experimental Module for the Iterative Design of Satellite Subsystems version 2 was taken to the stratosphere on a suborbital platform.

This operation was part of the spring-summer Fort Sumner 2021 campaign of NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) program.

“The system we developed was mounted on one of these platforms, and last Tuesday it had its flight” it left New Mexico, reached a maximum altitude of 36 kilometers above sea level, and traveled along with teams from two U.S. universities, as well as one more from NASA, explained the master in engineering, according to a UNAM press release.

As he explained, the module is used to test in near-space conditions technologies that will later be integrated into satellites, which in turn must be evaluated in vacuum conditions, extreme temperatures, and cosmic radiation.

The mission was planned to travel a year ago, but due to the pandemic, the activities were suspended, and the flight conditions were changed since no member of the team could be present in person.

“Faced with this situation, the university students made modifications to the plan and instead of including a model of a CubeSat type satellite with deployable solar panels, something very similar to a real satellite, they changed to a similar, but more compact system with everything integrated that would work automatically with just an on/off switch,” the engineer explained.