17/08/2021
LEDSAT, the second Sapienza nano-satellite to be launched this year, has been launched on 17 August 2021 on-board the Vega VV19 Launch Vehicle from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana.
The satellite has been developed by the students and researchers of the S5Lab research group (coordinated by Prof. Fabrizio Piergentili and Prof. Fabio Santoni) and it has been integrated at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. LEDSAT’s mission has been conceived in collaboration with the University of Michigan, while the satellite development is supported by the Italian Space Agency within the IKUNS Programme (Italian-Kenyan University Nano-Satellites). LEDSAT is the third IKUNS CubeSat to be launched, after the success of 1KUNS-PF, launched in 2018 and de-orbited in 2020, and WildTrackCube-SIMBA, launched in March 2021 and operative in-orbit.
The project has participated since 2017 in the European Space Agency “Fly Your Satellite!” Programme, who offers technical support during the satellite development and provides the satellite team with a launch opportunity at the end of the qualification phase.
The nano-satellite, with dimensions 100x100x113.5 mm, has already started to demonstrate an innovative navigation and tracking method for small satellites. The spacecraft equips 140 Light Emitting Diodes able to be tracked from ground-based telescopes, which will determine the satellite orbit and reconstruct its attitude by analyzing the acquired satellite flashes. After the launch, LEDSAT has been released in-orbit at 5:30 Italian time on August 17 and it has successfully completed the first contact with the ground station in Rome around 10.30 of the same day. In the first 150 orbits, the satellite team has already completed an initial check on the well-functioning of all components, getting closer to the end of the delicate “commissioning” phase of the mission and ready to proceed with the nominal operations.
The satellite has been designed, integrated and tested by a large group of 30 students of aerospace engineering of our university. Students at all levels, from Bachelor’s to PhD have been participating in the development and testing of the payload. Four students (Lorenzo Frezza, Andrea Gianfermo, Paolo Marzioli, Niccolò Picci) have been participating in the integration of the spacecraft in the flight deployer, completed in Brno (Czech Republic) on July 15, 2021, while two students (Lorenzo Frezza and Paolo Marzioli) had the chance to attend the final integration procedures of the deployer on the Vega PLA module at the launch site in French Guyana at the end of July.
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