A satellite for students, made by students

It was more than three years ago that D.V.A. Raghava Murthy, Project Director, Small Satellites Projects, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Satellite Centre, Bangalore, was addressing a group of college students in that town on what a fascinating subject space was and how students should get interested in it. His speech was so riveting that at the end of the meeting, a group of students met him and

asked him why ISRO could not help them in building a satellite. Thus began the story of Studsat, a tiny satellite that was built by 35 students belonging to four engineering colleges in Bangalore and three in Hyderabad. Studsat was put in orbit by the PSLV-C15 from Sriharikota on Monday. “Studsat is part of the encouragement given by the ISRO to colleges and universities to learn space technology and learn how to build, nano, micro and pico satellites,” said Mr. Raghava Murthy. Indeed, Shewata Prasad, one of the students from Bangalore, was fascinated enough by the Studsat project that she gave a wide berth to a well-paying job, her teachers said.

“The contagion” has caught on, and four other nano satellites are in the pipeline. According to Mr. Raghava Murthy, these are a three-kg “Jugnu” satellite being built by the students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur; a 3.5 kg satellite called Pradhan being built by the students of IIT-Mumbai; and two other satellites, each weighing less than 10 kg, that are being assembled by the students of SRM University and Sathyabhama University, both in Chennai. Anusat, a 40-kg satellite, built by Anna University, Chennai, had been put in order by one of the earlier PSLV missions.

The Studsat employed several frontline technologies that were designed and developed by the 35 students themselves with guidance from ISRO. “It was a multi-disciplinary effort,” said Professor B.S. Satyanarayana, Principal, R.V. College of Engineering, and Prof. S. Jagannathan, Head of the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in the same college. It took the students about a year and a half to design, build and test the Studsat. (The project began in August 2008). The lead institute in the project was Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology (NMIT), Bangalore.

How it works

The satellite has a camera which can take pictures in the HAM code. The camera can take pictures of the earth, which can help in predicting the weather. The resolution of the images, taken from an altitude of 637 km, was 90 metres, said H.C. Nagaraj, Principal, NMIT and Professor Jharna Majumdar, Professor, Department of Computer Science Engineering in the same college.

“The ground station built by the students in Bangalore is one of the achievements of this project,” said Prof. Satyanarayana. It received the signals from the satellite soon after the Studsat was put in orbit and the students also built a clean room for testing the satellite.

While NMIT contributed Rs. 45 lakh for the project, six other colleges chipped in with Rs. 45 lakh. The six colleges are Rashtriya Vidyalaya College of Engineering. M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology and B.M.S. Institute of Technology, all located in Banglore, and Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Institute of Aeronautical Engineering and Vigyan Institute of Technology and Science, all located in Hyderabad. The Department of Science and Technology, Karnataka Government, gave Rs. 5 lakh to the project.

"Initially, we found it funny, how can we develop a satellite? We are only electronic students of second year and third year, but something started ticking in our head, and we got in touch with ISRO," said the team leader of the STUDSAT project, Chetan Angadi.

Their guide Professor Jharna Majumdar, a former scientist with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), can barely conceal her pride.

"Some attempt has started in the country with nanosatellite, microsatellite, but picosatellite is the smallest satellite weighting one kg. The students wanted to do something which is not there, which they will be the first person to do," said Majumdar.
The satellite would also have an on-board computer, communication system, power system and altitude control system.

Majumdar said the data would be analysed at a ground station, Nitte Amateur Satellite Tracking Centre, at her institute.

STUDSAT is the lightest ever satellite to be flown by ISRO. Therefore, accuracy had to be 100 per cent.

"We had to match the satellite with existing system. We spent endless nights in developing satellite, three to four models so that we could choose the right model, maintain weight considerations as we had to build a system under a particular weight," said the structure co-leader of the STUDSAT, Kiran.

Now, that the big moment is near, the STUDSAT team has only one prayer.

"We pray to god that the satellite goes to orbit, gives the data which inspires other younger students," said Professor Jharna Majumdar.

(Team members from different colleges who built the first Inidan PICO Statellite "STUDSAT" seen with dignitaries while handing over the 1st Indian PICO Satellite STUDSAT to ISRO in Bangalore )