Meet the team behind Ireland’s first satellite which is due to launch into space on Friday

The failure meant significant delays and alternative arrangements had to be sourced with the satellite now due to take flight on a rocket manufactured by the Elon Musk-founded company SpaceX.

The re-usable rocket, Falcon 9, will launch from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying the tiny 2kg piece of home with it.

Not dissimilar to a carton of milk, the miniature cube satellite which is around the width of a coaster and just 2cm longer than most dinner forks, is capable of much more than its size lets on.

“Once it’s up there, the most exciting experiment as a physicist is the gamma-ray burst experiment,” said test engineer Jack Reilly.

“Occasionally, stars will come together and explode, and emit a light that we can’t see with our eyes, so once we send EIRSAT-1 into space its detector is capable of seeing this light, and from that we can learn a lot about how stars die."

Irish pioneers

Although Ireland is the last of the 22 ESA member states to have its own satellite in space, that is not to say that Irish researchers have not been pulling their weight since right back to the beginning.

For example, Irish scientist Professor Denis O’Sullivan was among the first to carry out studies on Lunar rocks which were brought back by Neil Armstrong and the crew of the first Moon landing on Apollo-11, in 1969.

Separately, Susan McKenna-Lawlor has been involved with various experiments on ESA, Nasa and Russian Space Agency missions.

She was also the principal investigator for an experiment on the ESA’s revolutionary Giotto mission which photographed and studied Halley's comet after launching in 1985.

Many Irish researchers have followed in their footsteps but EIRSAT-1 is an opportunity for Ireland to show what it is capable of on its own, according to Director of EIRSAT-1 and the UCD Centre for Space Research, Professor Lorraine Hanlon.

“We’ve been part of much bigger teams and that’s allowed us to work collaboratively and internationally and make progress, but the next step was how do we actually do this ourselves from the beginning,” she said.

Prof. Hanlon said the team at UCD has designed, built and tested EIRSAT-1 since 2017, “knowing it inside out” which has been enormously valuable for teaching in Ireland.

It will also be beneficial from a financial point of view by encouraging a scaling up of the industry in Ireland which she said already hosts about 90 companies that work with the ESA.

'Devastated' by setback

Prof. Hanlon said the team at UCD was “devastated” by the setback earlier this year but is now looking forward, and hopes that this will mark the first step in further similar launches saying: “We should be doing more”.

“It would be so sad if having gone through this process and all of this learning, capability and infrastructure to do this work, if we weren’t able to build on that and keep that momentum and skillset in the country.

“EIRSAT-1 is the first Irish satellite, we do not want it to be the last Irish satellite, that would be horrendous. We want to grow and do more in space,” she said before adding: “We can show that we can do it.” 

The space sector has been continuously growing across the world over the past 30 years, according to project manager Dr Ronan Wall, something which is vital in terms of assessing the impacts of climate change, weather patterns and predictions.

He said there is a small but growing space industry within Ireland which brings its own set of benefits in terms of education and preparation for those who wish to work within the industry.

“They’re going to need people to work for them which is one benefit and will allow us to support and train people going into that industry,” he said.

'National pride'

Laura Cotter, a PhD student from Minane Bridge in Cork, echoed just that in saying the project will hopefully allow her to work in the industry.

The project has allowed heavily involved students to gain rare experience in working with a real satellite that will soon retrieve important data in space.

She was one of four to join the EIRSAT-1 team last year and looks forward to taking data from the satellite once it is in orbit.

“When it comes to a practical sense, we’ve been launched into this team who are incredibly talented and the imposter syndrome is there,” she said.

She said understanding how the technology works has been a majorly beneficial factor throughout working on the project.

“There’s a sense of national pride there too,” she said before adding that Irish children won’t have to leave the country if they want to pursue similar careers.

Alongside an experiment to detect gamma rays, the satellite will also test an in-orbit demonstration of a protective coating technology developed by UCD and Enbio Ltd as well as a new control system designed in the UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

The new control system could potentially help in clearing space debris, a growing concern among the space science community.

“Space debris is there because there hasn’t been any historical legislation to keep space clean. For historical reasons, there are a lot of rocket parts and parts of space crafts which are dangerous because they’re travelling at huge high speeds.

“They damage spacecraft and they can damage the space stations which would be the worst-case scenario,” said Mr Wall.

After detaching from Falcon 9, EIRSAT-1 will unfold and sail at an altitude of about 550km for five to seven years before de-orbiting naturally and burning up entirely on re-entry.

The satellite was initially due to launch on Wednesday evening however has been delayed until Friday when it will launch at around 6:45pm Irish time.

Although SpaceX is keeping details close to its chest, it is understood that the delay may be due to weather conditions with Friday being more optimal than Wednesday.

However, the last-minute change of schedule is not atypical for launches of this type with scheduling often being unpredictable.

The launch can be streamed live online on the ESAtv channel on Youtube.