Lift Off!

04/16/2024
By Brooke Coupal

On Oct. 4, 1957, a light hurtling through the night sky left Supriya Chakrabarti in awe. Then a child living in India, Chakrabarti had just witnessed the flight of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to successfully enter Earth’s orbit. The sight sparked his imagination, and a lifelong fascination with space took hold. During solar eclipses, Chakrabarti and his father would use a bucket of water to observe the sun’s reflection as the moon passed between the Earth and the sun. Like millions of people around the world, he was transfixed by Apollo 11’s July 1969 lunar landing. 

By the time Chakrabarti entered graduate school in the mid-1970s at the University of California, Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science, he had set a goal of working on projects that would be launched into orbit. While such opportunities were hard to come by, Chakrabarti was determined. He ended up working on multiple space missions, including one involving the U.S. Air Force STP78-1 satellite. 

“I got to design and build things that got put into space,” says Chakrabarti, who for the past 12 years has been a Kennedy College of Sciences (KCS) professor in the Department of Physics & Applied Physics. “Not too many people got those opportunities.” 

Thanks to scientific advances over the decades, opportunities to work in the space industry have grown. KCS faculty members are helping to break down remaining barriers to expand opportunities for space research. 

“We’re opening the doors to making space more accessible,” says Chakrabarti, who is the director of the university’s Lowell Center for Space Science & Technology (LoCSST). 

Very Small Packages

When Sputnik 1 launched in 1957, the satellite weighed about 184 pounds and was the size of a basketball. Like most technologies, satellites have gotten smaller and more powerful; now, some can fit in the palm of your hand and weigh less than a pound. 

“You can do useful things with very small packages, which is why there’s a big push for smaller satellites,” says Timothy Cook, a physics associate professor and LoCSST researcher. 

UMass Lowell is making it easier to get small satellites into space through an initiative known as the Massachusetts Alliance for Space Technology and Sciences (MASTS), which is being funded in part by a two-year, $5.5 million grant from the state via the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. 

Established last year and spearheaded by Chakrabarti and Cook, MASTS offers a one-stop support system for researchers and businesses looking to build and test small satellites and spacecraft components. 

MASTS will provide several testing capabilities, from a vibration shaker table to test how satellites withstand space launches to an anechoic chamber for radio communication testing, according to LoCSST Senior Mechanical Engineer Jason Martel, who is overseeing the build-out of the facilities. 

These efforts come at a time of rapid growth in the space industry. According to one industry estimate, the world’s space economy totaled $546 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow 41% over the next five years. 

“We will be the support for small companies, larger corporations, nonprofits, fellow research universities and community colleges,” Cook says. “If you have an idea, we can help you turn it into reality by providing the tools to get you there.” 

UMass Lowell students will be involved in small satellite projects through MASTS and will receive training to help run the facilities, providing them with hands-on experience for careers in the space industry. 

“The excitement that students get with the idea that something they have put their hands on is actually up in Earth’s orbit doing useful science, it is now an opportunity that students are going to have with these facilities,” says Jeffrey Hoffman, a former NASA astronaut and a professor of the practice of aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is a partner of MASTS. “MASTS will benefit not just students at UMass Lowell, but students from the whole region.” 

Mission Success

Chakrabarti and his team at LoCSST are no strangers to launching a small satellite into space. On Aug. 29, 2021, a 9-pound satellite built by more than 100 students over five years went aloft aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Less than two months later, it was successfully released into orbit from the International Space Station. 

Students involved in the mission, known as Science Program Around Communications Engineering with High Achieving Undergraduate Cadres, or SPACE HAUC for short, worked on every aspect of the satellite, from building the hardware to designing an antenna that would allow for communication between the satellite and a ground station located on the rooftop of Olney Hall on UMass Lowell’s North Campus. 

Susanna Finn served as the deputy principal investigator of SPACE HAUC and worked as a mentor to the students. She came to UMass Lowell as a postdoctoral researcher in 2014 before becoming a research scientist for LoCSST. She is currently a program scientist for NASA’s Heliophysics Division, where she will remain for up to three more years before rejoining LoCSST.

“SPACE HAUC was a really small satellite, so the students had to design in this very compact and lightweight format, which is part of what made it such a good learning experience,” Finn says. “Students had to think about all these restrictions and challenges and make it work.” 

With the launch of SPACE HAUC, Chakrabarti came up with an idea for a new satellite called Chickadee. SPACE HAUC was sent into orbit by a launcher developed by Nanoracks, a provider of commercial space services. The launcher holds several satellites, and when it’s filled, a space the size of a full-grown black-capped chickadee (the Massachusetts state bird, which weighs a half-ounce and is about six inches long) remains empty. Through MASTS, Chakrabarti and Nanoracks are teaming up to develop a satellite to fit in that space. 

“My goal is for Chickadee to be used at universities and high schools, allowing more students to get involved with experiments in space,” Chakrabarti says. “That will help bring more students into the STEM field.” 

The small satellite could also be a more affordable option for companies looking to test their instrument or technology in space. 

Beyond Satellites

In addition to developing small spacecraft, LoCSST researchers have conducted multiple space missions to address big questions about the cosmos. 

Finn and other LoCSST researchers built an instrument, known as the Limb-imaging Ionospheric and Thermospheric Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrograph (LITES), to gain better insight into the Earth’s upper atmosphere—specifically the ionosphere and the thermosphere. LITES launched in February 2017, and was mounted on the International Space Station. With the station orbiting the Earth 16 times every 24 hours, LITES collected a lot of data.

“It allowed us to get a more complete picture of the upper atmosphere,” Finn says. 

LoCSST is also on the hunt for planets outside of the solar system. The latest iteration of its planet-seeking telescope project is known as the Planetary Imaging Coronagraph Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment for Debris Disks, or PICTURE-D for short. The telescope, the fourth in a series, consists of an instrument called a coronagraph that can block out light from stars so that dimmer objects, such as planets, can be seen. PICTURE and PICTURE-B were launched via sounding rockets, while PICTURE-C made its way to the stratosphere via a helium balloon that was roughly the size of a football field. 

Once ready, PICTURE-D will be launched using the same balloon system, as this gives researchers about 12 hours to collect data as opposed to using a sounding rocket, which typically stays in space for only five to 20 minutes. “There might be a planet like Earth orbiting a star that’s like the sun, and if so, we’d like to find it someday,” says Christopher Mendillo, the principal investigator of PICTURE-D and a LoCSST assistant research professor. 

Sunip Mukherjee ’23 assisted with the PICTURE projects as well as other LoCSST space missions while a physics Ph.D. student at UMass Lowell. He is continuing his work there as a postdoctoral researcher.

“I don’t think there are too many places in the world that offer experiences like this,” he says. “I want to be at LoCSST as long as I can.”

Threats of Space Weather 

UMass Lowell may make it easier for people to build and launch spacecraft, but a looming threat remains—space weather. 

“Inclement space weather triggered by massive storms on the sun has increasingly become a threat to our modern space-based technology infrastructure,” says Physics Prof. Paul Song, director of UMass Lowell’s Space Science Laboratory. 

For instance, in February 2022, nearly 40 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites burned up during a geomagnetic storm, in which eruptions from the sun’s surface caused disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field. 

To help prevent such occurrences, Song is working to develop a better understanding of space weather. He has created a computer model of the solar atmosphere, which provides greater insight into the physical processes that affect the formation of space weather. Song and his research team have also developed and tested new technologies to remediate the impacts of space weather on satellites. 

One major phenomenon that emanates from the sun’s upper atmosphere, known as the solar corona, is solar wind. Solar wind can lead to geomagnetic storms when its charged particles seep through Earth’s magnetic field. Physics Assoc. Prof. Ofer Cohen focuses his research on the solar corona and how it behaves to better predict space weather events. Like Song, Cohen uses computer simulations. 

“Sometimes, doing an actual experiment is really expensive or it may be unrealistic, so putting together computer models gives us a simulated experiment where we can control the conditions to gain more knowledge on how space works,” Cohen says. “The simulations can also help inform the designs of future space missions, because we know what to expect.” 

Cohen’s goal is to gain enough information about the solar corona’s behavior so that space weather forecasts can be pinpointed to a time and place. 

“We want to get to a resolution where we can say, ‘At this time, satellites above Japan may be impacted by space weather for half an hour,’” he says. 

Black Holes and More 

Physics Assoc. Prof. Silas Laycock, who oversees the UMass Lowell Schueller Observatory, is interested in a different type of space wind—stellar wind, specifically in X-ray binaries. 

X-ray binaries consist of a collapsed star, such as a black hole, neutron star or white dwarf, that orbits around an ordinary or massive star. Just like the sun, ordinary and massive stars release streams of charged particles, known as stellar winds. The nearby collapsed star captures a portion of the stellar wind and subsequently produces X-rays. 

X-ray binaries can provide a better understanding of the physics of very dense objects. Black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs are all extremely dense. “This information is really useful for something like building a nuclear fusion reactor," says Laycock. 

One X-ray binary that has caught the attention of Laycock and his research team is IC 10 X-1, which consists of a black hole and a massive star located in a starburst galaxy more than 2 million light years away. The group has been analyzing the interaction between the stellar winds of the massive star and the X-rays coming from the BLACK HOLES AND MORE black hole in an effort to accurately measure the properties of each object. 

Ph.D. student Nicholas Sorabella ’21 created a computer model that can be used to discover black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs in binary systems, as well as to estimate their parameters, such as mass and radius.

The tool models multiple astrophysical effects, including gravitational self-lensing, in which a black hole acts as a magnifying glass when passing in front of a star, causing the star to appear brighter from our perspective. A peak in light could indicate that a black hole or other dense object is present. 

Sorabella, who received an award for his work through NASA’s Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology program, plans to make the tool available to the public. 

“It is an easy-to-use tool designed for someone who has very little coding knowledge,” he says. “The tool will give citizen scientists the opportunity to find potential black holes and other compact objects.” 

From designing small satellites to finding black holes, Sorabella and other UMass Lowell researchers are bringing space closer to more people, whether students in a high school science class, a curious backyard stargazer or a startup enterprise looking to conduct research in space. 

“We are trying to inspire people to take an interest in space exploration, just like Sputnik 1 did for me all those years ago,” Chakrabarti says.