Since 2007, students at University of Louisiana of Louisiana at Lafayette have been designing, building and launching real satellites into the Earth’s orbit. The Cajun Advanced Picosatellite Experiment program, or CAPE, is the student-led program which allows engineering students to come together, learn advanced engineering skills and apply them to the exploration of the final frontier.
CAPE specializes in cubesats, which are extremely lightweight and small compared to most satellites. Following their invention in the late ‘90s, cubesats were not widely used or given much press. Despite that, many professors from universities all over the world were starting their own cubesat experiments, especially since cubesats are so much lighter, and therefore cheaper to launch into space.
Professor of practice and electrical engineering, Dr. Paul Darby, was one such professor.
“With cubesats you can pretty much have a volunteer army of students who are going to do it on the cheap and build these cheap satellites for a few thousand dollars as a opposed to a few million,” said Darby.
Despite the profound economic advantage that cubesats granted, they didn’t seem to be on NASA’s radar. So to get UL Lafayette’s first satellite CAPE 1 launched, Darby instead had to ask Russia for help.
Rocket technology is considered military technology, so an American was required to personally deliver CAPE 1 to the launchsite in Kazakhstan and place it in the rocket, while the Russians were not allowed to know what was inside of the satellite.
The program’s first satellite was a fairly simple device featuring mostly control and communication systems, but since then, CAPE 1’s successors have come a long way. After attracting NASA’s attention, CAPE was finally able to procure rocket launches from the agency.
Projects became more complex with each iteration, with CAPE 3 featuring an experimental credit card-sized radiation detector that will hopefully one day be used by astronauts.
CAPE 1 through 3 were each roughly four inch wide cubes, but CAPE 4, the current satellite under development, is more like three of those cubes stacked upon each other. CAPE 4 will feature Armor 2, a follow up to the radiation detector experiment, a power system, and a star tracker– which will track the position of celestial bodies. The satellite will also have payloads from other universities for the first time in the program’s history.
But that’s not all CAPE has up its sleeve, the follow up to CAPE 4, CAPE Twiggs, will have Robert Twiggs, co-inventor and “founding father” of the cubesat, working with UL Lafayette as a collaborator and mentor. CAPE Twiggs will be much more complex than previous satellites, upon entering orbit, it will eject 20 smaller “thin satellites”, six of which will be given to highschools in the Lafayette area, for students to program their own experiments.
When asked where he hopes to see CAPE in ten years from now, Darby answered: the Moon!
“It is not trivial. Radiation can destroy circuits, it can corrupt computer programs so you’ve got to provide designed safe guards for radiation, because once you get out of low earth orbit, it gets a lot more intense,” Darby said.
Most satellites are designed and built by highly experienced (and expensive) engineers. But with the exception of Darby and Garth Likens, the full-time program manager, CAPE is completely composed and led by students.
Ethan LeBlanc, a senior majoring in engineering working at CAPE, said, “We recruit basically since freshman [year]… and of course, they won’t likely have any of the experience we need to actually work on a satellite, so we take it upon ourselves to train and catch them up and teach them as much as we can.”
Underclassmen often attend weekly classes taught by seniors, allowing them to learn the advanced material they need.
CAPE provides a unique opportunity for students allowing them to not only learn more advanced material, but as program manager Likens put it: “This is an opportunity to work as a team and collaborate with other people… It’s a space to actually apply the fundamentals of engineering that maybe in other classes and laboratories you don’t have the opportunity to organically apply.”
If students want to experience that space for themselves, they will be welcomed to visit the CAPE lab during Engineering and Technology Week from March 18-22.
Besides the various advantages CAPE provides to students’ educations and resumes, at the end of the day, students get to leave their fingerprints on something real and tangible that will last forever, or at least until it falls back down and burns up in the atmosphere.