At t-minus 60 seconds before liftoff last Friday morning, Laura Peticolas could be seen on a Zoom call crossing her fingers on both hands.
Peticolas, a Sonoma State University professor who is associate director of its STEM learning center, has for the past five years been managing an evolving team of students who built a miniature satellite, or CubeSat, along with undergraduates from Howard University and the University of New Hampshire.
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Their efforts culminated in a spectacular milestone at 10:44 a.m. Friday, when that satellite, slightly larger than a half-gallon carton of milk, was propelled into the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere on a rocket that blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
“Ignition,” intoned a man in SpaceX mission control, after counting down from 10. “Engines full power, and liftoff. Go Falcon, go Transporter 15.”
He was referring to the Falcon 9, a partially reusable rocket designed to carry satellites and smaller spacecraft into orbit. All told, the Transporter 15 mission deployed 140 satellites into orbit, where each will carry out its own mission.
As the massive, two-stage rocket finally pushed off the launchpad — after being postponed several times since its originally scheduled Nov. 10 launch — Peticolas could uncross her fingers.
Four minutes later, after the first stage of the rocket was jettisoned, a remote camera on the ship showed an array of rectangular containers, waiting to be deployed into space.
“Those are the CubeSats and the satellites they just showed us,” Peticolas announced to the 50-or-so participants in Friday’s Zoom call.
The CubeSat built by the Sonoma State students and their Howard and UNH cohorts was bound for the outer reaches of the atmosphere, to gather data in collaboration with NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission.
Their mini-satellite will monitor how the solar wind interacts with the upper atmosphere, according to a statement from SSU.
“Solar wind storms can cause the atmosphere to expand, causing additional drag on satellites that cause them to deorbit earlier than expected.
“Understanding the solar wind helps scientists in their quest to improve space weather forecasting and better protect technology in space and on Earth – such as communication networks, power grids, and GPS – from potentially damaging large solar flare events.”
Sixty-three minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff, with the rocket 323 miles above Earth’s surface, a voice from mission control delivered another long-awaited piece of good news:
“Three-U-Cubed, separation confirmed” — prompting celebrations throughout the Zoom call.
“WOO-HOO — we went early!” exclaimed Peticolas, who’d been consulting a SpaceX schedule that had her satellite being deployed a half-minute later.
“Congratulations everyone,” added a man on the call. “That’s amazing. We are going into orbit.”
“We are in orbit,” confirmed Peticolas. “Wow, wow, wow, wow. That’s so cool!”
After a commissioning period, during which it was gradually awakened, she explained, the 3UCubed satellite would commence transmitting data. As part of their deal with NASA, to get a berth on the rocket, Peticolas and her colleagues at the two other schools guaranteed the agency that 3UCubed would remain in its sun-synchronous orbit for at least two years.
Keeping her eye on the display provided by SpaceX, she then said, “Looks like we’re coming over the Arctic Ocean.”
Afterward, Peticolas recalled feeling “disbelief” and “awe” following liftoff and the successful deployment of 3UCubed.
“They say rocket science is hard for a reason,” she said, speaking of “challenge after challenge” faced by project leaders — starting with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that arrived shortly after they got funding from NASA.
“We had to figure out how we were going to do a hands-on engineering science project over Zoom,” she said.
“So we shipped stuff to people. We did simulations, we did a lot of coding. We did a lot of prep, and drove equipment to students homes.
“All of these thoughts were going through my mind as I’m watching the rocket go into space with our CubeSat.”
Jennifer Ortiz, now a Sonoma State physics major with a concentration in astrophysics, said “I never thought I’d learn how to operate and test a ground station until I became a part of this team.
“From accessing scripts through terminals to even understanding RF concepts” — a reference to radio frequencies — “enabled me to develop skills in satellite communications that I’ll bring with me to grad school,” she said.
Haley Joerger, a member of SSU’s class of 2024, said the CubeSat project “had a profound impact on my personal and professional growth.”
Working on the satellite’s hardware, she added, gave her experience in instrumentation “that I now apply in my role as an application engineer at Keysight Technologies.”
Project lead Noe Lugaz, a research professor in physics and astronomy at UNH, echoed Peticolas’ thoughts on what an arduous but fulfilling journey it had been.
In the nearly six years since the group made their initial proposal to NASA, he said, “it’s been a lot of work from the students, mentors and all the staff.”
The Thanksgiving season, he added, was an ideal time to salute all who had made this possible.
“We’re very excited to get to the next stage of getting data” from 3UCubed.
In using the expression “next stage,” he added, to laughter, he had intended no pun.
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.