The 7th of December 2020, NTNU and ESA signed a Memorandum of Collaboration for adding NTNU to the ESAs academic network through the establishment of ESA_Lab@NTNU. The new agreement, signed by ESA Director General Jan Wörner and the university’s Rector Anne Borg will establish a close cooperation between ESA and the research community at the university, as well as the industry and...

Our team is currently putting together a Hardware-in-the-loop test platform with the same hardware from our partner NanoAvionics and our in-house developed hardware we want to put into the satellite. It is important to test, test, test, and fail, and test, test, test, and fail…did I mention test and fail? when you’re building CubeSats. The most common issue facing CubeSat teams is the...

At Space Dinner 2020, Dordije Boskovic was awarded the NIFRO prize for best space related master thesis. This is an annual prize, rewarded for the 8th time this year. Dordije received this prize for his work on a near-real time FPGA implementation of target detection algorithms for hyperspectral remote sensing applications. The prize consists of a small model of the NORSat satellite, a diploma...

To ensure that the payloads are sufficiently rugged, they are subjected to a controlled mechanical shock on a shock testing machine. Mechanical shock is a nonperiodic motion of the foundation or an applied force on a mechanical system that is characterized by suddenness and severity. Image from UP Aerospace...

Next week, some of the HYPSO students are going to Denmark to perform radiation testing on the camera with a Cobalt 60 radiation source. Why are we testing radiation on our camera? Because space can be a harsh environment for spacecraft with energetic radiation sources that can darken the glasses in our camera, resulting in poorer optical quality for the hyperspectral images. HYPSO...

Before the hyperspectral imager can be used, it must be calibrated. The calibration provides calibration coefficients that are applied to the data before further analysis. Spectral calibration maps from spectral pixels to actual wavelengths, which is needed to recognise spectral signatures in the data. Radiometric calibration converts from sensor counts to spectral radiance, which is used to...

One of the on-board tasks is going to be target detection, but in order to be able to detect features or targets in the acquired images, it is beneficial to have images with a spatial resolution as high as possible. If the resolution is low, the task of differentiating between objects becomes hard. Higher spatial resolution can be achieved by doing on-board processing of images....

Yesterday we had a great workshop with Idletechs' Petter and Harald. Idletechs are working together with HYPSO on the on-board processing. As you can see, the whiteboard is an essential tool when building satellites! We also have a gigantic one in our lab that is in frequent use.

The wealth of spatio-spectral data obtained using modern hyperspectral imager has brought in new challenges in the analysis and extraction of useful information from hyperspectral datasets. That is why we are developing an on-board processing system which will reduce the data downlinked to our ground stations. A significant part of the on-board pipeline is target detection. The objective of...

One of the main motivations behind many space technology projects and applications, is the desire to learn more about the Earth and to use this knowledge to improve the society and improve our lives. This is especially true for many Earth observation missions, such as our HYPSO. EU and ESA teamed up in 2016, and engaged in common projects for space outreach. One of their goals is to better...

In addition to the previously mentioned HSI (HyperSpectral Imaging) mission, we have another mission for the Software Defined Radio (SDR) in the pipeline. The longer-term goal of the SDR mission is to provide Arctic researchers with easier and faster access to scientific data. We want to design a flexible communications system that includes SmallSats and different kinds of sensor equipment. To...

For the HSI camera to capture something interesting, HYPSO's attitude will be controlled such that the camera points towards parts of the oceans we want to observe. Magnetorquers and Reaction Wheels are used to avoid the satellite spinning from perturbations or simply pointing in the wrong direction. By modeling the physics of the system, it is possible to simulate how...

We have returned form Porto! It was great to meet up with the Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory at  U.Porto, and to get some insight into how their successful organization is doing things. (https://lsts.fe.up.pt/) Due to some troublesome weather and a series of unfortunate events we were not able to do ALL the things we had planned, but we still managed to get some nice...

Each image that the HYPSO mission captures must be downlinked to one of our ground stations. In doing so, the image file passes through multiple subsystems and is transferred over several communication links, including a radio link which is somewhat undependable by nature. At any point in this network, packets may be corrupted or lost, and the connection to the satellite may suddenly be...

Orbit NTNU is a student organization founded in the spring of 2018. Their goal is to develop, test and launch CubeSats and act as an incubator for space interest among the students at NTNU. The organization is based on the students’ interest in space technology and wish for making use of theory in practical applications. Thus, with its 40 members from different engineering fields of study Orbit...

Trick Question! You don't, not for sure. But to get a close estimate it is important to do tests. Next week we'll be flying a prototype of the instrument intended to go to space. It will be flown in Porto as there is still a chance of algal blooms there! Wish us luck! Written by: Sivert Bakken

To ensure the reliability of our imaging processing pipeline, it is necessary to test each constituent module. Because we have not collected satellite-based data with the v6 hyperspectral imager yet (see previous post), we are testing some of the modules on images created from a simulated push-broom technique.  One of the properties that the image registration and motion blur correction...

Today, the V6 hyperspectral imager (a launch prototype) had its first flight aboard the NTNU UAVlab's octocopter at the Udduvoll airfield near Trondheim. A pattern was flown over both land and river, flying 2 m/s at 100m altitude in overcast conditions. Lots of data to analyze now as we work out the details for our next flight tests in Porto...

A couple of weeks ago, Endre Dåvøy from Orbit was kind enough to make us a new badge!  We've already started using it in templates and such, and look forward to including it on more material.    

On of the darkest days of the year; not an ideal day for oceanographic observations in the Norwegian waters, two applications securing funding and more activity were approved. The Norwegian Research Council gave the green light for our application for a project named MASSIVE - Mission-oriented autonomous systems with small satellites for maritime sensing, surveillance and communication...