Watch this Space

CPUT Vice-Chancellor Prof Chris Nhlapo congratulated engineers from the university’s African Space Innovation Centre (ASIC) in person when the continent’s first satellite constellation was successfully launched.

The Marine Domain Awareness Satellites (MDASat) have already started successfully transmitting data after they were launched aboard US aerospace company SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The mission carried a total of 105 spacecraft, including CubeSats, microsats, PocketQubes and orbital transfer vehicles.

On Thursday the VC, along with members of his management team, joined the ASIC team at the laboratories where the nanosatellites were built in Bellville, and watched the launch live with them. The group excitedly tracked the lift-off then watched the MDASat’s being deployed about 45 minutes later.

Speaking to members of the media afterwards Prof Nhlapo said it was mission accomplished- for now.

“This was the biggest satellite project to date there are many other projects in the pipeline so it is a big niche area. So I say watch this ‘space’,” he said.

“We are a university of technology and we must dominate in the applied science space, our research must benefit the people of SA. That is why we want to encourage more undergraduate and post-graduate study in this growing field so that the country can keep developing its capacity.”

Acting Chief Engineer on the project Nyameko Royi says each satellite will initially make an average of four passes per day, but that will steadily increase.

“As satellites eventually drift further apart we’ll have breaks between overpasses and as they eventually spread further apart we will have an average of 12 passes per day. We are also still tracking previously launched nanosatellite ZACUBE-2, which makes it 16 tracking operations per day. We expect an average of 1883k bytes of data to be generated per pass per satellites,” he says.

This data will be used to secure South Africa’s ocean resources amongst other things.

Written by Lauren Kansley

Source: CPUT