ASU students are using a toaster-size satellite to search the galaxy for habitable planets

MARK BRODIE: A lab at ASU is allowing students to get some experience working with telescopes on a specific mission.

The Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS, is a small telescope — about the size of a cereal box. It’s monitoring the ultraviolet levels of a type of star. Danny Jacobs is a Professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

DANNY JACOBS: What we’re trying to do is to look at enough different stars in this type to be able to make predictions for any other of that star type. So it doesn’t even matter if these particular stars have planets — we just want to see the ones that are kind of representative of the galaxy. Because there’s so many in the galaxy.

It’s just like doing a survey of people out in the world — you don’t call literally everybody to ask them their politics opinions. You call like a hundred and just make sure you ask different people. So, that’s what we’re doing.

MARK BRODIE: Jacobs says the most common situation for a habitable planet is for it to be right next to a star that’s flaring all the time. That’s the kind of thing this team is looking for: staring at what are called M dwarf stars and counting the number and size of flares.

DANNY JACOBS: The goal is to monitor the most common kind of star in the galaxy. The most common kind of star is also gonna be the star that’s most likely to have a planet, because if you just take planets and you scatter them around all the stars, it’s gonna be the most common kind of star. And the most common kind of star is an M dwarf star — it’s much smaller and redder and cooler than our star — it’s very different than our star.

MARK BRODIE: Jacobs says ASU has invested in small satellites by building a CubeSat lab called the Interplanetary lab. He says to think of it as training aerospace company that’s staffed by students and run and managed by faculty.

One of those students is senior Josh Sink, a mechanical engineering major. I met up with him in the lab recently, and asked about a typical day there.

JOSH SINK: Typically with my schedule, I’ll come in here earlier off the morning, right? So 9:00 a.m., we’ll probably have a contact with the satellite closer to about 9:30, 10 a.m.

So I’ll show up at 9. We make sure all operation stations are ready to go, right? All of our setup checklists are complete. And then we will then operate the satellite from about 9 to about noon.

BRODIE: And when you say operate the satellite, you’re sending it commands to do something, right?

SINK: Yes, yes. So quick example is we’ll establish a connection, right? In this connection, we’ll go ahead and gather information. We are led by a flight director, so the flight director will then take us through a planned activity for the day. And this activity was briefed beforehand.

So we’ll do things such as send sequences. These are commands that essentially tell the spacecraft what to do later. So if we’re observing or we’re testing or whatever it is we’re doing, we’ll send those out. And then we also got to gather a lot of information from all the observations that we take.

BRODIE: Now you mentioned that you’re measuring UV levels. What is that telling you? What are you looking for by measuring the amount of UV in a particular place?

SINK: A lot of this, we’re calibrating. We’re working on it. In a more general sense, what the UV tells us is if there is a chance of a habitable zone for planets outside our solar system.

BRODIE: So you’re looking for life, some form of life outside of Earth?

SINK: Well, we’re looking for a piece of that puzzle. So there’s a lot of things that can determine that. UV radiation is the harmful things that can — it’s kind of like when you get a sunburn, that’s your UV radiation, right? So if the UV levels are far too high, obviously there is no chance for habitable zone there.

BRODIE: So it sounds like you’re both ruling places out and also ruling the possibility of a place in. Like if the UV levels are too high, you can say, "Well, we’re not going to find anything here."

SINK: Yeah. A lot of this is on our science team. So we’re kind of the bridge between that. So we’ll take a look at all of this data later on and then, yeah, we can kind of look at — we’ve got a list of targets. So we’ll use some as calibration, and then we’ll also look at some new things and compare with some data. So yeah.

BRODIE: What have you learned by doing this? Not necessarily just about sort of the data and what it is telling you, but maybe what have you learned about things that might interest you or about yourself or about sort of the universe more broadly?

SINK: Yeah, there’s there’s so many things that I’ve learned from this project. I think the realm of satellites in general, I really didn’t understand and the potential for science. So if our little toaster that’s out in space with a telescope is able to contribute to something as big as like looking for habitable planets and things like that, I think it really put in perspective like how cool science really is and how cool space is.

And on the technical side of things, I’ve learned a whole lot of data this, satellite that, right? But I think the absolute coolest thing is just the potential for what we can actually do out there.

BRODIE: Now I would imagine you’re somebody who was inclined to think science is pretty cool to begin with, right? You’re a mechanical engineering student. You’re not somebody who’s coming in from a non-scientific background. But was it difficult to sort of take that background and do something that is at least somewhat different than what you had been doing?

SINK: I would say yeah, there’s definitely a learning curve. You learn a lot of new things. So mechanical engineer’s a lot more techie, right? You learn about physics and science things revolving, like structures and stuff like that.

But once you start looking at science missions kind of like this, which really doesn’t have much to do with mechanical engineering, there’s there’s a lot to learn. You pick up a lot of terms from people nearby. It’s such a big bucket of knowledge. It’s pretty cool.

BRODIE: Has this changed what you think you might want to do when you graduate? Working here?

SINK: Potentially. I think what has changed mostly is I really want to do space. So before, I was a little unsure. I wanted to get involved on campus. I found the lab, ended up getting hired. But now it’s kind of locked it in for me. Whatever is in space that I got to do or find, that’s what I want to do.

BRODIE: What does it meant for you to be able to do this kind of work as an undergrad?

SINK: It it means a lot. It really does. I was really kind of confused on what I wanted to do, right? I knew I wanted to do engineering, but I didn’t know what. But this opportunity to work on SPARCS, it really kind of paved the way for what I want to do with with my time, you know? So that that means a lot having a passion.

BRODIE: So what is it like when you’re all sitting at those computers back there and you’re working on a mission or something? Can you sort of take me into what it what it’s like, what it feels like, what the mood is like in the room when that’s happening?

SINK: Yeah, I think I can give you a great example of our first contact. So it’s pretty typical for sometimes like you try to connect to your satellite and you get nothing, right?

So you don’t necessarily know exactly where it’s at when it’s uh when it gets launched and deployed. We don’t know exactly where it’s at. We get kind of a general idea. So based off of that, we’ll try and connect to it and the room is it’s silent, right? We have our comms on. Our flight director is making a couple call outs, right?

BRODIE: You’re all on the headsets?

SINK: All on the headsets, yes. So we’ll get things like our elevation, right? So our dish is going to point and track this thing. So as it’s pointing, we’re getting just small callout elevations, right?

We have something called acquisition of signal and loss of signal. This determines how long we’re on contact with the satellite. So we’re getting time counts down to the end. We’re waiting. It’s quiet. And we’re waiting to get that signal.

And then [SNAPS FINGERS] just like that, you get the signal. All of your dashboards, they light up like a Christmas tree and then the guy responsible for watching that says, "We have acquisition of signal." And it’s that moment right there, especially on day one, was was really something just kind of out of a movie because we’re talking to something in space. So that kind of atmosphere in itself, it’s it’s exhilarating.

BRODIE: That sounds so nerve-wracking waiting to get that signal that, OK, we’re good, we can we can do this now.

SINK: Yeah, the suspense is pretty real.

BRODIE: Josh Sink is a senior and a mechanical engineering major at ASU. He also works in the Interplanetary Lab there.