Missouri S&T students design satellite headed to space to test fuels

Space X’s February launch will include a satellite that was designed and built in Rolla.

The small satellite is named M3 - short for Multi-Mode Mission - and is built in three cubes. It’s about the size of half a shoebox but is still big enough to test two different kinds of propellants.

“It's able to perform chemical burns, like the burns that you see on rocketry with all the flame spewing out of it. It's a very powerful burn, but it uses fuel very, very quickly,” said Drake Beaman, a junior in aerospace engineering from Pleasant Hill, Missouri, who is the project’s chief engineer.

“It also will test an electrospray burn, which is kind of like the little puffs of air you see in the movies when a spacecraft slowly reorients itself to face a certain direction or just keep itself in orbit,” he said.

The NASA-approved satellite is scheduled to launch on SpaceX’s mission on Feb. 1. It will spend the first week of its orbit becoming acclimated to zero gravity and the vacuum of space. Then it will spend two days completing the tests.

“This will be a technology demonstration in which we use different methods of propulsion for the satellite,” Beaman said. “It will have chemical and electric components and will be fed a liquid propellant. The thruster will be fired in the vacuum of space, with zero gravity, for five 30-second bursts.”

The satellite’s data will then be sent to Iridium Communications, which specializes in satellite communications, and transferred to the S&T team.