Santa Clara University

SCU Students Control Nanosatellite for NASA

Following the successful launch Tuesday of NASA's PharmaSat nanosatellite from Wallops Flight Facility and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport located at Wallops Island, Va., students from SCU’s Robotics Systems Laboratory (RSL) are working around the clock conducting all mission operations for the satellite. PharmaSat rode to orbit aboard a four-stage Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket. Also aboard were the Air Force Research Laboratory's TacSat-3 satellite and three other four-inch cubed satellites developed by universities and industry.

SCU students developed the entire command and control systems for the mission and also contributed to the design and test of the satellite and wrote the programs to track the satellite and run the on-board experiments.

PharmaSat will investigate the effects of antifungal agents on the growth of yeast in microgravity. This research could improve understanding of how microbes may become resistant to the drugs used to treat sick astronauts on long-duration space missions.

"After a spectacular launch as a hitchhiker on the Tacsat-3 mission, we made contact with PharmaSat and confirmed that the spacecraft deployed successfully," said Bruce Yost, PharmaSat mission manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The PharmaSat mission and science teams are now preparing to complete the experiment on the yeast cultures."

Approximately 20 minutes after launch, PharmaSat separated from the Minotaur 1 rocket and entered low Earth orbit at an altitude of approximately 285 miles. About 90 minutes after launch, contact was made with PharmaSat. Christopher Kitts, RSL Director, was enthusiastic about his team’s performance. “The SCU student ops team exceeded all expectations by making contact with the satellite through both communication systems during our first series of contacts,” he said. After a spacecraft checkout period, student ground controllers will monitor PharmaSat’s biological experiment and may issue commands to optimize its processing timeline based on the health of the yeast. The primary biology experiment is expected to last on the order of four or five days.

Now that PharmaSat is activated and has begun transmitting radio signals to ground control stations at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and Santa Clara University in California, the SCU team will collect this data, process it, and send it to the NASA mission management team at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Kitts and SCU staff members Karolyn Ronzano and Mike Rasay are members of the management team. The SCU operations team is planning on conducting NASA-related operations for as long as six months, and once that is finished, the satellite will be used by SCU to support both student research experiments and classes in satellite operations and spacecraft design.

PharmaSat is the follow-on project to the highly successful 2006 GeneSat1 mission, which was also operated by SCU’s student-based team.

Information about PharmaSat.