SSEP has a legacy of students going on to work in the leading edge of industry. For the 2017/2018 academic year, SSEP students are going on to:

• Carie Navio – Computer Engineering – Lockheed Martin: Carie is the lead for the IMG and CDH subsystems of the ARC2 satellite. She is graduating this Spring and will be working for Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas as a software engineer in Skunk Works Division.
• Brandt Lomen – Electrical Engineering – BAE Systems Inc.: Brandt is project lead for PSI. He is graduating this Spring and will be working for BAE Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire as an electrical engineer.
• Michael Geyer – Electrical Engineering – Lockheed Martin: Michael is part of the COMM team for the ARC2 satellite. He is graduating this spring and will be working for Lockheed Martin in Owego, New York as a Radio Frequency Hardware Engineer.
• Katie Aikens – Mechanical Engineering – Boeing: Katie is the Lead Mechanical for SSEP. She is graduating this Spring and will be working for Boeing in Tukwila, Washington as a technology and innovation engineer.
• Morgan Johnson – Electrical Engineering – NIST: Morgan is the SSEP Lab Manager, and lead of the LEDL subsystem of ARC. After this Spring, she will be going to NIST to design a biomedical suit for emergency response personnel.
• Jordan O’Dell – Electrical Engineering – NASA Marshall: Jordan is the Lead Electrical for SSEP, and a first year graduate student. He began a Pathways internship at Marshall Space Flight Center this Spring, and will be returning to work for SSEP this summer.
• Justin Long – Electrical Engineering – NASA Goddard: Justin is a first year graduate student developing a phased array antenna for the advanced communication platform. He will be continuing his research at NASA Goddard this summer.
• Sasha Wessels – Electrical Engineering – Graduate School: Sasha is working a CubeSat prototyping platform. He is graduating this Spring and will be going to graduate school in the United Kingdom.
• Robert Miller – Mechanical Engineering – NASA JPL: Robert is the project lead for DARS. He graduated in Fall, and is interning at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories with the Project Formulation Division. He will be attending graduate school at the University of Southern California, studying Astronautical Engineering.

AMPPS is a charged particle spectrometer designed for use on CubeSats and sounding rockets. Its mission is to fly through active regions of Earth’s magnetosphere and record the rapidly changing flux of electrons and ions responsible for the aurora and other space weather. Space weather can be disruptive, or potentially destructive towards satellites. Studying these particles can help us better understand Earth’s space weather and forecast its potential problems to minimize impact.

AMPPS will use a hemispherical electrostatic analyzer of the type developed by C.W. Carlson. It accepts particles from all around a planar field of view, and guides them down to a circular detector region, while also differentiating the particle’s kinetic energies. The charged particles are then directed toward a stack of Micro-Channel Plates, which multiply the particle’s signal to be measurable.

AMPPS takes full advantage of the CubeSat form factor’s “Tuna Can”, a 64mm diameter cylindrical open volume above the Z- face of the cube, which allows extra space for instruments to protrude beyond the structural rails. AMPPS will be approximately 50mm in total height, but a large portion of that is in the tuna can, leaving more space in the cube for other systems.

AMPPS will likely work on a 1.5U cube, and may even work on 1U. However, AMPPS is more suited to larger CubeSats to allow for more solar power, and more reliable attitude control.

Flight Opportunities

Black And Diffuse Auroral Science Surveyor (BADASS) – February 9th, 2026

• SmallSat 2025 Poster
• Additively Manufactured Plastic Plasma Spectrometer in AIP Review of Scientific Instruments
• AMPPS High Voltage Power Supply Thesis
• AGU 2023 Poster

In the fall of 2015, over a dozen UAF engineering and science students, working in the Space Systems Engineering Program, wrote and submitted a proposal to the NASA Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP) opportunity. On April 6, 2016, NASA announced that the UAF proposal was one of the 47 selected, receiving $200,000.

The primary mission proposed is to refine the ARC bus architecture, fly an improved Launch Environment Data Logger, and modify the COMM subsystem by creating a flexible communication infrastructure (satellite and ground) that would allow testing of variable coded modulation techniques and retro-directive antenna arrays for small satellites. Additionally, students are developing several science payloads for future missions. Some of these payloads (currently in concept phase) include developing (i) a Solar Sail deployment and drag experiment; (ii) an imager system to observe sprites in the upper atmosphere; (iii) an imager system to observe Arctic methane and black carbon.

NASA will award more than $8 million through the competitively selected Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP) to 47 teams of undergraduate students to conduct hands-on flight research.
Through the USIP Student Flight Research Opportunity program, NASA seeks to build science, technical, leadership and project skills among undergraduate students by offering them real-world experience in developing and flying science or technology experiments that are relevant to NASA’s missions.
Eighty-nine proposals were received in response to a joint solicitation from NASA’s Office of Education, working through the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, and the agency’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) in Washington. The 47 selected projects will fly on suborbital and orbital vehicle platforms, such as CubeSats, aircraft, sounding rockets, balloons and other commercial platforms. NASA will cover launch and flight costs, and each award has a two-year period of performance. Award amounts depend on the project and range from $50,000 to $200,000.
Through USIP, NASA continues its tradition of investing in U.S. education, offering real-world experiences, with the goal of developing students’ skills and capabilities in science, technology, engineering and math – skills critical to building a robust, STEM-literate workforce and achieving the nation’s exploration goals. NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, in Wallops Island, Virginia, manages USIP for the agency’s Office of Education and Science Mission Directorate.

From NASA

From UAF News and Information, by Sue Mitchell.

A small research satellite designed and built by University of Alaska Fairbanks students is among 13 launched early Thursday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The tiny satellite, known as a cubesat, flew on the NASA National Reconnaissance Office’s Government Rideshare Advanced Concepts Experiment, or GRACE.

The Alaska Research CubeSat, called ARC-1, was the culmination of a UAF Alaska Space Grant Program project five years in the making and the result of work by a whole team of students, as well as collaborations between the College of Engineering and Mines and the Geophysical Institute. UAF engineering students Patrick Wade and Matt Pacheco hand-delivered the tiny satellite, just under 4 inches square, to California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for incorporation into the rocket payload last March.

Work on the project started in 2009 under the tutelage of Denise Thorsen, director of ASGP and faculty advisor to the Space Systems Engineering Program at UAF. NASA developed the CubeSat Launch Initiative as a way to give universities access to space. Because they are so small, multiple cubesats can be packed in a rocket used to deploy a larger satellite.

Similar to NRO’s previous cubesat rideshares, GRACE will reach orbit on an ATLAS V rocket, mounted to the aft-bulkhead carrier, located on the aft end of the Centaur upper stage. GRACE will carry a total of 13 cubesats, nine sponsored by the NRO and the four sponsored by NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. The cubesats are ejected into space once the primary payload is safely on its way.

The team has turned down previous possible launch dates because the orbit wouldn’t get the satellite to a high enough latitude in order to communicate with it from Fairbanks, Thorsen said. “There’s no sense in having a satellite we can’t talk to.”

This launch will put ARC-1 in an elliptical orbit at a latitude just north of Fairbanks and between about 500 and 310 miles from Earth.

ARC-1 will perform three tasks during its roughly one-year lifespan. An experiment activated at liftoff will collect data about temperature and vibration inside the rocket. The students will also evaluate a novel, low-power attitude control system they developed, and a camera will transmit back images of snow and ice cover. The students will track ARC-1 at the NOAA and NASA Fairbanks Command and Data Acquisition Station at Fox, which hosts a ground station for the students.

Once ejected from the rocket, ARC-1 will begin transmitting a beacon on a ham radio frequency. Any ham radio users around the world who pick up the signal will be asked to send an email message to Thorsen stating when and where they picked up the signal. Thorsen will send each respondent what’s called a QSL card — a written acknowledgement and thanks for the information. Once the ARC-1 orbit is accurately characterized and the cubesat is being tracked, the UAF students will instruct the satellite to transmit information on a specific radio frequency.

“The main goal of our cubesat was to monitor the rocket launch environment on the ride up,” Thorsen said. “Our cubesat will collect that data and store it. Once we have proved out the health of the cubesat and it tells us how much data it collected, then we will give it the command to start downloading that data.”

Information about how well the novel satellite attitude control project is going will be part of the beacon, Thorsen said.

“When ARC-1 is kicked out of the rocket, it’s tumbling, we can tell that by the beacon data,” Thorsen said. “Over time we hope the tumbling will stop and the satellite will be pointed in a particular direction.” All the control and attitude adjustments are preprogrammed into the cubesat.

Thorsen said 36 UAF students have worked on this satellite since the project’s inception. Five were graduate students, another five started as undergraduates who became graduate students. Thirty-two of the students who’ve worked on the project were undergraduate students. Two of the 36 were high school students; one of these is now a freshman at UAF.

Five students attended the launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base: Jesse Frey, Morgan Johnson, Chic O’Dell, Patrick Wade and Matt Pacheco. Thorsen and a graduate student will monitor the launch from Alaska.

The team used facilities within the College of Engineering and Mines and at the Geophysical Institute to make sure the Alaska Research CubeSat met NASA specifications.

SSEP acquired a new lab with the construction of the UAF Engineering Facility! Take a tour of the lab space in the above 360 Panorama. Beyond the major projects that SSEP works on, our lab provides a space for students to work on research, homework, hold meetings, teleconference, and socialize. Besides designing and building satellites, we use it for design reviews, teleconferences, class projects, homework, and movie nights. We invite all students to use this space, even if they aren’t actively working on a project with us.

The lab is divided into two halves, onse used for general purpose and the other for hardware fabrication, assembly, and testing. The general purpose side of the lab features a conference table with video conferencing capabilities and an 80 inch monitor hidden behind a sliding whiteboard. This is where lab meetings, proposals, design reviews, presentations, and teleconferences occur. We also allow students to work on homework, eat lunch, watch movies, and socialize in the general purpose area. A bank of four desks with computers allow students to do research and homework in this area. A wall of cubbies provide a space for students to store their backpacks and projects.

The hardware area is for fabrication, testing, and integration of hardware. The large aluminum cage with coils of wire is the Helmholtz cage, which is used to generate a magnetic field for testing magnetometers and attitude control systems. The first bay to the right of the Helmholtz cage is the communciations workstation, where we design and test our communications systems and operate our ground station. The communications workstation has a full suite of communications test equipment, as well as a copy of the ground station hardware for prototyping and testing. The bay to the left of the Helmholtz cage is the mechanical workstation, where our mechanical engineering students design and fabricate our structures. The mechanical workstation has a Tormach PCNC milling machine and a 3D printer. The other two bays are general workstations for other subsystems and projects. The large central table is a project assembly area. The corner to the left of the double doors is a fabrications area with a wall of storage bins and a fume hood.

SSEP also maintains a soldering lab in the Duckering basement. Besides the standard soldering equipment, we keep and reflow pick-and-place and a reflow oven. SSEP also shares equipment with Geophysical Institute in the Electronics Lab, where we have access to a vibration table and thermal chamber.