Student Club Is Innovating To Lower the Cost of Satellites
Matthew O’Rourke, E’25, mechanical engineering, and Rachel Rakushkin, E’26, electrical engineering, were awarded Mosaic Prototype awards from Northeastern’s Center for Entrepreneurship Education for their work developing technologies to reduce the cost of satellite components as part of the Project Horizons student club.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras. Main photo: Matthew O’Rourke and Rachel Rakushkin are members of Project Horizon, the university’s satellite club. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Building a space satellite isn’t cheap. These Northeastern students are researching ways to bring the cost way down
If all goes according to plan, Northeastern University student club Project Horizon will send its first satellite into space in late 2025.
The club, which is part of AerospaceNU, is working to send a series of satellites into space as part of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, or CSLI.
Project Horizon is hoping to launch its first satellite, Pleiades-Atlas, into space next year, but has several other satellite projects in the works.
That includes a collaboration with the university’s electrical engineering and computer sciences departments to establish the world’s first sub-thz satellite network platform, which has the potential to provide high-speed internet access to remote parts of the world.
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Matthew O’Rourke and Rachel Rakushkin are working on making cheaper satellite components. Photos by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
NASA’s CSLI program is designed to help and inspire educational institutions by providing them support and technical guidance to develop CubeSats—small, cube-shaped satellites used for research. In addition, NASA also provides those institutions with the launch infrastructure to actually send those satellites into space once they are completed.
But even with NASA’s assistance, developing such technologies can get expensive, often requiring components that can cost tens of thousands of dollars or more.
That’s why Project Horizon plans to reduce costs by developing some of those components itself.
The software it develops will be open-source, it says, and it will document the process online, so that other institutions can develop their own in-house parts using Northeastern’s plans.
Two students in the group were recently awarded Mosaic Prototype awards from Northeastern University’s Center for Entrepreneurship Education to help develop those technologies.
Matthew O’Rourke, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student and the space mechanics team lead for Project Horizon, is one of several students in the group. They are working on developing a more affordable 3D cage to simulate how the satellite will function in a magnetic field in space.
O’Rourke uses an analogy to play out the importance of the technology.
“If you think of chucking something out of a car at a really high speed, it’s going to be spinning uncontrollably,” he says. “That’s roughly what happens to our CubeSats when they get launched, after that we have to slow our CubeSat down and get it to detumble.”
That’s where the cage comes in. The cage is composed of a number of magnetic coils that can be used to slow the satellite down and steer it.
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