ORESAT – Oregon’s CubeSat MicroSatellite Project

ORESAT Command Center, PSU

In the late summer or early fall of 2020, the ORESAT satellite, with the help of NASA’s cubesat program, will be loaded onto what we believe will be a SpaceX Dragon rocket and launched into orbit.  This will be the first satellite from Oregon, and one built from scratch.  Many other universities and groups are buying off-the-shelf parts and putting their own satellites up into space at a faster pace, but there is very little design or engineering skill going into those projects (And we would guess very little learning too).  Instead, the students involved in the Oregon ORESAT project are basically doing everything to make the project work, and making it all open source on their ORESAT Github page.  Andrew Greenberg is the driving force of the Portland State University Aerospace Society and of the project.  However, this is a multi-university group effort and we here at the University of Oregon have had our part.  UO physics faculty suggested a payload project, now underdevelopment by PSU students, and I crosswalked the project with the Next Generation Science Standards so that we could develop some educational outputs from the project that would match goals of educators in Oregon’s K-12 school system.

Here I am working a 2.4 GHz receiver that you can plug into a cell phone to get the video camera view of the ORESAT satellite as it flies over Oregon

A model of the ORESAT  cubesat suspended by a helium balloon with an active transmitting camera from which the receiver above can get video images – Maseeh Engineering Building, PSU