It’s risky business doing anything in space. It’s even riskier business scheduling a media interview to coincide with the assumed success of anything launched into space.
On 25 May 2017, Elias Aboutanios – Associate Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at UNSW Sydney – was supposed to be live on-air at the ABC in Sydney, talking about the successful deployment of UNSWEC0 which, along with two others, was to be the first Australian-built satellite to make it to space in 15 years.
UNSW-EC0 was a CubeSat, not much bigger than a loaf of sliced bread. Its outer surface was covered with the solar panels needed to power its brief three-month lifespan, and it carried several pieces of specialised equipment whose purpose was to analyse and image Earth’s lower atmosphere and surface.
The three tiny CubeSats had launched in a rocket from Cape Canaveral just over a month earlier. Their transport had rendezvoused with the International Space Station, and on May 25 they were to be pushed out from the ISS, deploy their antennae, and commence communicating with the team.
Except they didn’t. Aboutanios and his colleagues urgently started trying to figure out why. “We work on the assumption that it’s not dead, and if it’s not dead, we work out what the possibilities are for it not talking to us,” Aboutanios says.
It turned out that during a period of storage before launch, the fully-charged batteries in the CubeSats had drained. Once deployed in space, its solar panels began generating electricity to recharge the battery, but certain software components had become stuck in a resetting loop, preventing the release of its antenna. Even stowed, the antenna could receive some signal – but not enough for technicians on the ground to reset the system using the small comms antenna they had access to at UNSW.
They needed a bigger, ground-based antenna to generate a more powerful signal. “We spoke to CSIRO, we spoke to Defence in Australia, we spoke to NASA,” Aboutanios says.
Their white knight came in the unexpected form of an amateur radio astronomer in the Netherlands, who had access to an old radio telescope, but only on weekends. The first time he blasted the commands at the satellites, one of them – a CubeSat from the University of Sydney
