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Friday, March 29, 2024

Gainesville, we have a problem.

The first opportunity for UF’s ground team to make contact with SwampSat, a 4-by-4-by-4 inch satellite, passed by at 8 p.m. Wednesday with no peep from The Gator Nation’s first step into space.

SwampSat, the first picosatellite developed by researchers at the UF College of Engineering, was carried into space from a NASA facility in Virginia aboard a Minotaur 1 spacecraft Tuesday.

Norman Fitz-Coy, a UF associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said only five of the 29 satellites on board the rocket have been reached. Much like a mother looking for her child in daycare, it is difficult to parse through all of the satellites’ signals being broadcasted.

“Basically, we’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” Fitz-Coy said. “If we hear from 28 and still haven’t heard from ours, then we’ll get worried.”

The 29 satellites deployed from the rocket must spread out before SwampSat’s signal can overpower the crowd’s noise — a process that could take hours or weeks. Students from the college are manning the ground station by UF’s solar farm, where an antenna has been erected for communication with the satellite.

Fitz-Coy said SwampSat, which weighs 1.26 kilograms, was developed as a technology demonstrator to prove the capabilities of smaller form-factor satellites. It employs a controller movement gyro to provide rapid retargeting and precision pointing, similar to how a photographer can refocus a lens on a new subject. The roughly $250,000 satellite was in development for about two years before contracting a spot on the Minotaur 1 as part of NASA’s educational launch of nanosatellites program, which partners with universities to charter rides into space for their small research satellites free of charge.

SwampSat’s stated mission life is six months, but Fitz-Coy said as long as the satellite is active, UF researchers will continue to collect data from it. After the satellite loses functionality, it will return to Earth and burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere.

Krystal Ashman, a 20-year-old UF political science junior, was surprised she hadn’t heard about the satellite sooner.

“It’s a satellite developed and built by UF and launched into space,” she said. “That’s kind of a big deal.”

A version of this story ran on page 5 on 11/22/2013 under the headline "UF’s first satellite launched into space remains silent"

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