Welcome to the Big Red Sat team, we are a multi-disciplinary team of middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate students in the Nebraska public school system and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We are a sub-group within the UNL Aerospace Club's Aerospace eXperimental Payloads group that has been working on high altitude balloon launches and a 1U CubeSat, which deorbited on 1 August 2024.
Our repositories contain the original designs for the Big Red Sat-1 1U CubeSat, conceived, designed, and launched by a multi-disciplinary team of middle schoolers and high schoolers from the Nebraska public school system, as well as undergraduate students and graduate students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, as well as our payload for the High Altitude Student Platform.
The goal of this scientific mission is to characterize the performance and degradation of experimental perovskite solar cells from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory while in low earth orbit. To accomplish this, a custom precision curve tracer was designed along with a low-Ohm analog multiplexer that was integrated with Near Space Launch's 1U FastBus CubeSat Platform, which incorporates an electrical power system and Iridium satellite communication system for telemetry.
Electrical connections to the perovskite solar cell samples were made using pogo-pins, with the temperature of each sample being collected with a high-precision temperature sensor affixed to their back face with EP30-2 epoxy. The enclosure was designed to be airtight to prevent degradation due to humidity and oxygen, so a pressure and humidity sensor were included to monitor changes in this performance. Since the final samples had a coverslip epoxied to protect the perovskite layer, the airtight property was considered a redundancy.
Big Red Sat-1 was integrated into the Nanoracks CubeSat Deployer 27 (NRCSD27) on 12 December 2023 and launched on 21 March 2024 on the SpaceX CRS-30 mission.
Big Red Sat-1 was deployed from NRCSD27 by Voyager Space on 18 April 2024 at 18:05:09 UTC (Deployment Clip). The satellite made first communication with the operations team at 03:00:10 UTC on 19 April 2024. The satellite deorbited sometime after 23:41:51 UTC on 1 August 2024 after 105 days of operation.
