Barring weather or technical problems, Maine's first research satellite will be launched into space aboard a private rocket early Tuesday to collect climate data for Maine students studying urban heat islands, phytoplankton and harmful algal blooms.

MESAT-1 is one of eight nanosatellites traveling into space aboard Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket. Barring weather or technical problems, the rocket is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 12:05 a.m. on Tuesday.

“The excitement is part of the experience,” said Ali Abedi, vice president for research at the University of Maine, who leads the UMaine Space Initiative and oversaw the project. “The launch is exciting. Getting access to space data is exciting. It's the beginning of a new era in Maine.”

Firefly Aerospace will broadcast the launch live. The program begins on Monday at around 11:30 p.m.

The MESAT-1 satellite during its development and during its demonstration to a visiting group of high school students who were involved in the development of the satellite. Photo courtesy of the University of Maine

Abedi said the miniaturization of satellites has democratized space. Satellites used to be the size of school buses and cost up to a billion dollars. Now, for $100,000, you can build a stack of tech-packed cubes no bigger than a loaf of bread, giving universities, research centers and companies access to the stars.

Of course, the rocket has to travel all the way into space before the satellite can start its work. Due to a software error, the last Firefly Alpha rocket failed to put its payload satellite into the right orbit. It was parked so low in orbit that it was caught in the drag.

The MESAT-1 Firefly rocket was supposed to take to the skies in 2022. After several delays, the MESAT-1 launch has been postponed until the end of June as Firefly is now confident that the glitches have been resolved. However, windy weather has postponed the launch again. Abedi is confident that Tuesday will happen.

Once deployed, MESAT-1 will orbit the Earth for up to two years in a 560-kilometer-high polar orbit at a speed of about 27,000 km/h. The stacked cubes are covered on one side with antenna wires and a solar panel and have four multispectral cameras that measure different wavelengths of light.

The data is relayed directly or through a network of amateur radio operators around the world to the University of Maine ground station, which sends it to Orono for processing. The data is then shared with Falmouth High School, Fryeburg Academy and Saco Middle School.

These schools already won a competition to design the satellite’s scientific mission in 2019.

A diagram of a circuit board from the MESAT-1 satellite during its development, shown to a visiting group of high school students who were involved in the construction of the satellite. Photo courtesy of the University of Maine

PRACTICAL STEM LEARNING

Falmouth will use the data to study whether harmful algal blooms increase air temperature and water vapor levels. They hope to develop a method to observe the development, movement and spread of the blooms from orbit. They also plan to look for a relationship between humidity and temperature that would allow early detection.

“It was such a cool and interesting project,” said Shruti Joshi, a Falmouth University graduate who worked on the project in high school and is now entering her senior year at Princeton University, studying molecular biology. “I was really excited about the opportunities for scientific exploration, especially in Maine.”

Fryeburg Academy, a private boarding school, proposed using the satellite to photograph shallow coastal waters to assess water quality, such as turbidity and phytoplankton concentration, from space. The school will work with Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve to analyze the data.

Saco Middle School will study reflected light, also called albedo, and how it affects local temperature in urban and rural areas. The goal of the analysis is to determine if urban heat islands can be mitigated through architectural designs that reflect more light.

For Falmouth High School physics teacher Andrew Njaa, the project offered students the best hands-on STEM education he could imagine. Joshi and the three other girls who developed the proposal – two freshmen and two third-year students at the time – all went on to study science at university.

“As a teacher, I learned an incredible amount about how this type of learning works,” said Njaa. “What we learned wasn't necessarily what we expected. About rockets, yes, but about problem solving. It was a low-cost activity that had such a big impact. It's a much more exciting way for kids to learn.”

The majority of the half-million-dollar project cost—$450,000 of $522,000—was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with the remaining funds coming from the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine to support student research and the Maine Space Grant.

The satellite was built by engineering students from the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine, including Joseph Patton, who was then a third-year student at UMaine and is now a doctoral student working for NASA.

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