 It's one click on who's the March 22nd 2022 so you must be watching Science at Soast, live streaming from beautiful downtown Honolulu. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and every week we have young scientists from the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology telling us about some of the exciting research which they get to do here at University of Hawaii at Manawa and I'm really excited today because we have University of Hawaii going into space. We've got Joseph Ben-Goshon who is a staff member at the Hawaii Space Flight Lab, which is part of Soast as well as part of the College of Engineering. So, Joseph, welcome. It's great to have you on board and really excited to hear a little bit about what you have to tell us today as well as a bit of your background. So welcome. You are part of the Hawaii Space Flight Lab. So maybe we could start off just by telling us what is Space Flight Lab. Thanks for having me, Pete. Glad to be here. So the Hawaii Space Flight Lab was developed and established in 2007. As you mentioned, it's part of Soast and also a collaboration with the College of Engineering and is embedded within the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. And I graduated in 2017 with my Bachelor's of Mechanical Engineering and since then I've been working with the lab here as first a mechanical engineer and then now I've been doing project management, project engineer related stuff. So the lab, our main goal is to develop aerospace workforce development and satellite development here in Hawaii. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. And we really want to just kind of promote the collaboration of science and engineering between the different disciplines that we have here at UH as well as kind of build an aerospace workforce and industry here in Hawaii. So this is really STEM education on steroids, right? You're a mechanical engineer by training. We've got both engineers as well as earth scientists involved in this program. And it's really a well kept secret at the university that we're actually part of the space program. Now, I know you only joined Space Flight Lab back in 2017, but I think there was a little bit of history before that, which we can see in the first slide if we could go to the first slide. Now, here you are. I presume we're going to be talking a little bit more about what you're working on here in some of the related discussions. So I got the slide sequence wrong. If we could go to the next slide, slide number two, that would, there we go. This will give us a little bit more of the background. So Yusuf, as I said, you weren't with Space Flight Lab back in 2015, but do you know anything about what we're seeing here in the slides? Yeah, so that was the first satellite that was developed here at the lab with some of my co-workers who are still working here. And on the left, you can see Hyakuset. That's our 50 kilogram size satellite. It's a small satellite, which just means relative to larger ones. It's a specific size category. And they developed that as a precursor to one of our missions we're working on right now. And it was launched on that rocket you see on the right as part of the ORS-4 from PMRF on Kauai. And unfortunately, the rocket had a failure, so our satellite did not make it into orbit. But that was the first kind of real large project that HSFL worked on for the Air Force. Right. So I got lots of questions related to that slide, for example. Where you say it weighed 55 kilograms or I guess about 100 pounds in weight, what kind of size is that? I mean, is it the size of a Volkswagen bus or is it a microwave oven or how big was it? It's about the size of like a desk chair, maybe. And the black rectangles up on the sides. It looks hexagonal shaped, the satellite itself. What are the components we're seeing here? Those are the solar cells. So each rectangular shape, that's a solar panel, which just consists of those smaller pieces, which are solar cells. That's how it gets the energy from the Sun while in orbit and powers the satellite by charging the batteries. And unfortunately, it caused the rocket didn't work. But where was the spacecraft going to be launched? I was going to be launched to the low Earth orbit. And it had a hyperspectral thermal imager on top of that. So it was going to be taking images of the Earth in thermal imaging. And low Earth orbit would be a few hundred kilometers. So the altitude, the space station, something like that? Yeah. The space station is in low Earth orbit at about 400 kilometers. It can go a little lower. It can go higher. It really depends on the terminology you want to use. But yeah, in the hundreds, hundreds of kilometers. Hundreds of kilometers to 300 miles up. So that would have been really impressive. And it was launched from PMOF, which is the Pacific Missile Range Facility on West Kauai. I was actually there for the launch. It was really impressive what we could see. But obviously, it didn't work too well when it got to altitude sort of thing. Well, let's go back to the first slide. And that features you working on a different type of satellite, right? This looks smaller. And you're wearing almost a bunny suit. Explain to the viewers what it is you're seeing here. Yeah. So that's a specific size, standard size of small satellite called a CubeSat. And a CubeSat standard size is 10 centimeters on a side cube. And what we're looking at there is a 3U CubeSat. So it's three of those put on top of each other as the total volume. And that right there is about the size of a loaf of bread, I'd say. And that's neutron one. So that's our first satellite that successfully made it to orbit. Hawaii's first satellite as well in general. And that's currently still in orbit. So it's just over a year now since we launched. It's nearing the end of its life, which is about just over a year, just under a year and six months. So it's going to be coming back down and burning up in the atmosphere in the next couple months. But it's still up there and still beeping at us and letting us know it's still alive. Terrific. And I think we'll actually see later on in the show an image of neutron one being deployed in space. But this is quite an unusual capability that the university has. Let's take a look at some of the facilities which have been developed and I'm understanding much of this is student built or student run. So in this slide, for example, what are we seeing? So these are called ground stations. And those are used to communicate with the satellite. So we have to use radios to communicate up in space, right? Similar to like our GPS on our phones, those actually bounce up to the satellites in geostationary orbit usually, which is much higher up. And so these we have a few different ground stations that we help support and one as a university in general. So the first one there on the left is Honolulu Community College. That's usually, I think, mostly used by NOAA. The second one is that well being the the National Oceanographic and Apospheric Administration. Yes, yes. So that second one is our S band and UHF. That's what we're currently using to communicate with Neutron One. And that's also an amateur ham radio receiver. It has a few different bands that it uses that so the amateurs can communicate with it as well. And they have all over the mainland as well as here in Hawaii. And then on the right, we have the one here at UH Manoa, which we currently have UHF operational as part of another ground station network. Now, seeing that we've got these ground stations at several different places around Hawaii, is this a UH system wide endeavor? Or is it just that so? How big, how many people are involved or how many students at least? It's a lot of different groups. It's not just us. We maintain that one at Kauai for them for the most part. But there's other groups involved along with us. There's dozens of students every year that work on different projects of ours, including the ground stations, managing. We have students undergrad and graduate students that maintain contact with Neutron One, download the files and manage the contacts that we have and we've been getting. That's impressive. And do they get degrees or college credit for this kind of work? It's a mix of college credit through certain classes and experience real life experience is kind of the main. There's also cab stock projects that can be involved with those. I'm sure it must be great background training for getting good jobs when you graduate, sort of saying, because if you're working with the space program, that's high tech. That's an exciting career to think about. Yeah, that worked for me. Exactly. And the facilities aren't just scattered around the community colleges. I think that the next slide, slide four, we'll see some of the equipment which you guys have now. Where is this? It looks specific to the Jet Propulsion Lab, but I don't think it is. That's not as similar. But yeah, we have a clean room facility, which is what we're looking at there. That's in the basement of post where I'm at right now. And what we're looking at is the attitude, determination, and control system test bed. So that Hemholz cage, you can see those big circles, those create a magnetic field. And we use that to counteract the magnetic field from the earth and then put a simulated magnetic field of what the satellite would see while on orbit and what the sensors would read. So we do that along with that motion system. We use that to track the satellite as it's rotating on an air bearing there, which is kind of a, it's a friction, mostly frictionless bearing. So it uses air and you have like a hemisphere or a puck that sits on the air, on a cushion of air to give it a very low friction coefficient. And the motion tracking system just tracks that to see where we think it's more pointing. And the sun simulator, that's a fancy, you know, just a powerful light that we shine on it to simulate the sun that shines on the satellite while on orbit. And then the GPS simulator also puts in that GPS coordinates of where it would be. So the satellite essentially thinks with all its sensors that it's in orbit wherever we tell it it is. And then we use that to test our algorithms and systems and functionality of all the components. Okay, I got a whole string of questions related to that. But then let's start off. What do you mean by a clean room? My bedroom is pretty messy. So it's not one of those. But what is a clean room? That's a good question. So clean room is a standard. There's a bunch of different standards that you can use ours is a class 10,000, which I believe means that's 10,000 particulates per million or something like that, where it's a level of cleanliness. And it's the amount it includes how much particulates are in there. It also includes how often the air is exchanged. So it's really to avoid any dust and particulates. And the reason we wear that bunny suit is to avoid any of our, you know, skin cells or hair or anything getting in and around all the electronics. Okay. And how big is that room? You've got, you know, just the test instrument with the blank circles looks pretty big. It's at least one and a half times the size of a person. That's a fairly large room. That's, I don't know, the exact square footage. But you only see about maybe a third of the room in that picture. And this is on the Minoa campus, which is a remarkable facility to have. Now, all of the various attributes of that system, I think you're trying to say this is how you can put a satellite and test it in that environment before you actually put it into orbit. So for example, I think you were saying the air bed simulates the lack of gravity. A lack of friction. The lack of friction. So how would gravity actually influence the way the satellites would work? That's a bunch of different things. If you could figure out how to get rid of gravity for testing, we'd love to know. No one's really figured out how to counteract that yet. But we can do certain things. Since there isn't much gravity out in orbit, things only rotate, right? So they aren't being pulled down, you know, satellite while orbiting is just falling. So because it's in a free fall, it doesn't experience gravity, you know, as we do here on Earth. But in space, obviously, there's no atmosphere. So you're going to have vacuum conditions and probably the temperature changes. And I think your next slide, number five, shows that you've got other really impressive pieces of equipment there. And I'm looking at the silver cylinder there. What is that? Yeah, so that's the second half of that room, the clean room there in the basement. So yeah, like we're the other picture was showing that it was the frictionless environment. And that's really to get rid of the atmosphere to simulate that. This there simulates the it's a thermal vacuum chamber. So it simulates the vacuum as well as we can heat it up and we can cool it down to what the satellite would experience in orbit. It's usually down to like negative 20 Celsius, you know, a little lower, or it can go up to about 70 Celsius, depending on the orbit, of course, it can go much higher and much lower, especially if it goes out into the solar system and not just around the earth. Right. So again, this vacuum chamber basically you can suck out virtually all of the air molecules and how close to simulating the space environment can you get with that? It's relatively close. You know, there's specific terminology for that. It gets down to about negative 10 to the negative six to 10 to the negative eight tour, if you're familiar with that measurement for vacuum. And it's good enough for us for our testing. Depends what exactly the satellite is trying to do. If it's a spacecraft that's going out into the solar system, maybe you want to go lower and get an even higher vacuum, which can be achieved. But for us for low earth orbit, since there is a tiny, tiny bit of air molecules still, it is definitely good enough for us. Wow. And how long do you have to leave one of your satellites in there to gain enough information about whether it will survive in space? We try to put it through kind of what we call day in the life. So we leave it in for several days. And of course, takes us longer to warm it up and heat it up, warm it up and cool it down, depending on the size of the spacecraft. And that chamber is fairly large. It was meant for Hyakosat. So these small cube sats we're using are a little bit smaller and they can heat up and cool down pretty quickly compared to the size of that chamber. So we actually have a smaller chamber as well that we can use for smaller components. But that one is what we use for, since it is in the clean room there. How many universities have this kind of equipment? This looks, as I said before, almost like the Jet Propulsion Lab, right? Absolutely. I'm not sure. I wouldn't be able to say how many, but I'd say more don't have than do. Okay. Wow. Impressive. And I think the next slide will show the other part of the puzzle. Of course, you've got to launch the satellite and it's kind of a rough ride. So this blue monstrosity, what's the story with this? Yeah, so all the other components that were in the clean room that we talked about, that's more to kind of simulate the environment in space while it's in orbit. So this is a vibration and shock table. This is to have it test the experience on its way to orbit on the rocket. So you can have very different vibration profiles depending on the rocket launch that you're using. And who's launching it, whether it's SpaceX or United Launch Alliance or any of the others. And it totally depends on what that rocket does and what the satellite experiences. But this can do a wide range of different vibration. We mount the satellite to that table that you can see there and then it just shakes it at different frequencies to simulate what it might experience and make sure nothing breaks. So you can actually do various vibrations at simulated different parts of the launch sequence. So you don't just put it on the table and shake it up. It will go through a simulated launch profile with first stage separation and second stage or whatever. Yeah, you can totally do that depending on the requirements for that specific spacecraft. We have what we call random vibration that it kind of goes through a bunch of frequencies and does different accelerations. You can do sine waves, which kind of sweeps through a bunch of different levels. And there's also shock, which is a little higher, higher Gs. Unbelievably impressive. And there wasn't a scale or person in that image, but presumably that's what you use to test high accuracy or people used. So it's half a meter across or something like that in size. Yeah, I believe that one is about, I want to say two. So I can almost, it's like four foot, let's say, give you the exact numbers. And okay. Now, how long does this whole process take? You design a satellite and then you put it in the Helmholtz cage or you put it in the thermal vac or you shake it to bits. Are we thinking about weeks or decades here? How long tell a viewer how long it takes to build a satellite like this? Yeah, so it's been getting shorter and shorter relatively to what it's been in the past, especially with this small set, kind of like, quote unquote, revolution, where things have been getting smaller and faster. You know, we just had James Webb get launched and that was, you know, a 10, 10 year endeavor just for the build and 30 years in the making. Pretty intense and incredible and expensive. $11 billion as well. So it's a little different. We're on a totally different scale. We're, you know, relatively inexpensive that, you know, single digits of millions of dollars, as opposed to hundreds or billions. We also take, you know, anywhere from maybe a couple years for a small CubeSat, maybe even less, maybe a year for a 1U CubeSat, and then up to several years, depending on the size. I'm not sure exactly on the HiakaSat, but I'd say maybe around, you know, get like maybe five years, give or take a year. And that must be really great for a student because she or he can actually conceive of the satellite and then build it and have it launched during their career, right? So this is a relatively short time scale. Yeah, and we have different programs right now where we have vertically integrated projects here at, as part of the College of Engineering. And one of our professors that works with us, Miguel Nunesh, he has students working throughout, you know, anywhere from, you know, freshman or sophomore to working on a satellite. And they're going to be looking to launch their satellite in the coming year. And they'll have started the design, gone through the entire process, build and launch, all while still doing their undergrad. Perfect. And speaking of launch, the next slide, you worked on Neutron 1. I have to mention you didn't fly on the rocket, but it was sent up on some astronaut carrying mission. We're seeing the space station on the left. This is just over 18 months ago. So this is Neutron 1, the spacecraft which we saw you building earlier in the show. Yes, that is Neutron 1. And you can see the space station there on the left. And that's Neutron 1 being deployed from the space station. And that picture there on the right was taken by the astronaut, Kathleen Rubins. She was trying to sit there in the cupola and take pictures for us. Wow. And it's still working ever since November of 2020, huh? Yep, still working. So I went up on an ISS resupply mission. Astronauts took it out from the pod, put it into that deployer there you can see, and then launched it out with that arm. Okay, well, we're running a bit short of time, but I've got to ask, what's next? And I think the final slide will show us a little bit about what is next after launch pad literally, right? Yep, so that's our current six U-Cubes sat. So that's two of those three U's kind of put together. And it's the size of maybe a shoe box would be the closest. And that has a hyperspectral thermal imager, hence the name Hytide. That's our current mission. It's NASA funded. And our principal investigator is the director of HIGP here, Rob Wright. And we're working on that right now. We're actually in process of integrating it in the clean room downstairs as we speak. Fantastic. Now, you mentioned it was a hyperspectral thermal imager. What does that mean? So we would have to get into the science, which is not my specialty. What it really means is that it's seen infrared light, and it's using that to look at the earth, and it can measure crops, crop health, it can measure what different gases we see, to check on the volcanoes or wildfires, anything like that really. So lots of science projects as well as an engineering endeavor. You're an engineer. So do you talk to geologists or ecologists about how they would be using the measurements? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the kind of benefits that we have here at the university. Since we have all these wonderful and amazing scientists at our fingertips, and we kind of talk to them, ask them what do they want in a science mission. And then we as engineers kind of decide what's the best way to do that and put it together so we can actually do something useful. Fantastic. And is this going to be your career? You may not stay at UH the entire career, but are you keen to stay in the space program? Yeah, I believe that's kind of feel like it's my calling. And I'm originally grew up on Maui, so I'm looking to kind of stay in the islands and work with the university to continue our efforts with our workforce development and our kind of bringing our space industry here so we can have more STEM careers and opportunities. That's terrific. And I would imagine helping more junior students learn some of the engineering skills that you have would be really important as well. Absolutely. So definitely useful. And we have dozens of students every year that work with us on different projects, internships, and kind of getting real-world experience. Well, you said if I'm afraid with one at a time, but given that you're launching another spacecraft in a few months, I might invite you back again sometime in the future. But let me just remind the audience you have been watching Science at Soast. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark, and our guest today has been Yusuf Ben-Goshan, who is a staff scientist at the Hawaii Space Flight Lab within Soast and the College of Engineering. So that's all for today. Thank you for watching. And please join us again next week where we'll have another exciting student project to talk to about. All right. Goodbye for now. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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