A cereal-box-sized space telescope heads for the stars
ASU Professor Evgenya Shkolnik, principal investigator for the Star Planet Activity Research CubeSat mission, inspects the space instrument as its being built in a clean room.
A small space telescope roughly the size of a family cereal box — having cleared its pre-shipment review by NASA last spring — is now at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, where it will be readied for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E for a Twilight mission.
The Star Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS, will join two other NASA-funded missions — BlackCAT (short for Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope) led by Pennsylvania State University, and Pandora, led by Goddard Space Flight Center — as part of a group of small satellites, called SmallSats, flying together on a rideshare mission.
About the launch
All three missions are set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday, Jan. 11, at 6:19 a.m. Arizona time (5:19 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, 8:19 a.m. Eastern).
SpaceX will livestream the launch, with a live webcast beginning about 15 minutes prior to liftoff. Watch the broadcast on the Space X website or through X at @SpaceX.
SPARCS is designed to study flares and starspot activity of low-mass M- and K-type stars. These stars are the most numerous in our Milky Way galaxy and host most of the exoplanets, including most of the habitable-zone terrestrial planets in the galaxy, roughly 50 billion.
The telescope observes in ultraviolet wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye and absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, which is why an ultraviolet telescope needs to be in space.
By collecting high-energy photons from these stars, the mission will help scientists model how stellar flares can change a planet’s atmosphere. Some flares may be strong enough to remove water or destroy an atmosphere entirely.
“We will be sensitive for the first time to the rarest and the strongest of these stellar flares,” says ASU Professor Evgenya Shkolnik, the mission’s principal investigator. “And once we understand how strong flares can get, which we really don't know, we will finally understand how much energy is hitting a potentially habitable planet. Then we can use those data to calculate what that impact really is.”
ASU played a major role in building the spacecraft.
“Here at ASU, we designed and assembled the payload, which includes the telescope, integrated a camera built by JPL and added a computer to manage it all,” said School of Earth and Space Exploration Professor Danny Jacobs, a co-investigator on the mission.
The team spent months assembling and testing the payload before integrating it with the spacecraft chassis built by Blue Canyon Technologies.
Fifteen undergraduate students worked on SPARCS through the ASU Interplanetary Laboratory, gaining hands-on experience in the clean room and in other technical roles. About a dozen more students will be working in ASU’s Mission Operations Center once the space telescope is launched. Two PhD students previously completed their thesis work developing SPARCS and its test facilities.
Before leaving Arizona, the team packed the CubeSat in an electrostatic-safe bag and a crushproof, dustproof, foam-lined case. After arriving at Vandenberg, engineers inspected the spacecraft to confirm it was free from dust or shipping damage. The next step is integration with the Falcon 9 launch system.
With launch preparations underway, SPARCS will give answers to important space science questions and possibly clues about whether any exoplanets might have the right conditions to support life. SPARCS will also demonstrate new and innovative UV technologies developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that could then be used in bigger missions.
SPARCS is one of only two CubeSat missions selected in 2018 by NASA’s Astrophysics Research and Analysis program. It will be the first mission dedicated to long-duration ultraviolet observations of red dwarf stars. The project is a collaboration between ASU and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL built the spacecraft’s ultraviolet camera, SPARCam, which includes both far-UV and near-UV channels.
The ASU Core Research Facilities’ Instrument Design and Fabrication Core supported the SPARCS mission with machining custom components made on the Tempe campus, and AZ Space Technologies engineer team members Dawn Gregory and Nathaniel Struebel provided system engineering, thermal analysis and mechanical design.
About the team
In addition to Shkolnik and Jacobs, the full ASU team that developed and assembled SPARCS, its flight software and the mission operations systems that will be used to command the spacecraft includes: Professor Judd Bowman and former professor Paul Scowen (now at NASA GSFC), Tahina Ramiaramanantsoa, Matthew Kolopanis, Titu Samson, Maria Cristy Ladwig, Logan Jensen (PhD '24), Johnathan Gamaunt (PhD '24), Joe Dubois, and undergraduates Alec Arcara, Kaitlyn Ashcroft, Aaron Bournias, Noah Campos, Sam Cherian, Genevieve Cooper, Joseph Dukowitz, Tyler Field, Zachary Felty, Ella Greetis, Paulo Gonzalez Soto, Mark Jaber, Kooum Joshi, Ashley Lepham, Chris McCormick, Ysabella McAuliffe, Neil Naik, Tyler Nielson, Liam O’Mara, Hetvi Patel, Lillian Prigge, Alejandro Reyes Villas, Gabriela Roig, Ishi Shah, Josh Sin, Logan Skabelund, Dens Sumesh and Ben Weber.
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