Space Surveillance Tech Area Benefits from University Partnerships (Postprint)

Abstract : The University Nanosat Program (UNP) is a two year small satellite competition held among leading universities across the nation. In the past 12 years UNP has involved 27 universities and over 4000 students in a variety of engineering fields and other disciplines in the process of designing and managing the development of a satellite. The UNP is a partnership between the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The program's primary purpose is to help train engineering students in satellite design, fabrication, and testing by requiring them to build the satellite themselves with the assistance of their Principle Investigator and industry mentors as well as a series of six program reviews managed by the AFRL Program Office. Each university-built satellite attempts to further a specific technology or perform a scientific mission. Technologies advanced through the program include all aspects of small satellite designs including structures, propulsion, imaging, and navigation and have helped further science payloads such as energetic particle detectors, plasma probes, and photometers. This paper will discuss the educational impact on students involved in a hands-on, hardware focused program, with emphasis given to two UNP satellites relevant to Space Surveillance Technologies. The most recent winner of the UNP competition, Michigan Technological University's Oculus-ASR, is a calibration satellite for AMOS's telescopic non-resolved object characterization program. Another example is the University of Buffalo, which is collaborating with the AFRL MESSA program in the current competition cycle. The University of Buffalo's microsatellite is being designed to collect multi-band photometric data of glinting geostationary space objects.