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Designs, builds and operates satellites

Macquarie researchers and students are aiming to access space using satellites to facilitate terrestrial communications.

Macquarie Orbital is a cross-faculty student group based in the School of Engineering providing hands-on experience to students interested in aerospace projects and the growing Australian space industry. It does this by simultaneously offering Macquarie researchers and students access to space via orbital hardware and terrestrial communications, which Macquarie Orbital students either design/build/operate or act as skilled and industry-literate liaisons for.

Currently, the group is mid-way through the design and development of Macquarie’s first satellite, MQube-1, which is intended to be the first in a continuing series of spacecrafts designed, built and operated by Macquarie students, researchers and academics.

As of the start of 2020, we have been operating a satellite ground station via a Space Operations Centre within the School of Engineering.

Our projects

Space is cool. Space is hard. Macquarie is a university with a broader demographic reach than the “usual suspects” in the space game.

Macquarie Orbital aims to be an ongoing, iterative program with both space and ground hardware segments with continuous upgrade pipelines, ensuring longevity, enduring relevance and a range of projects to suit (nearly) every student’s interest.

MQube-1 is the first CubeSat wholly developed at Macquarie University. Intended as the first in an ongoing series of CubeSats, MQube-1 will test and demonstrate key support technologies, as well as building a knowledge base at the university, for a “build on demand” 3U research satellite bus including dominant sun-facing deployable solar array and corresponding attitude control, and experimental payload control based on Raspberry Pi and beyond-LEO fault-tolerant electronics.

As the primary science mission, MQube-1 will carry a bespoke thermal infrared imager, and several other secondary instruments which are intended to collect research-relevant data as well as acting as proof of concept for more complex future iterations and missions. The thermal-IR imager will be used to validate mineralogy mapping methods of the earth and the moon from Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) as a first step towards future cislunar and moon orbit missions with an eventual view to deep space planetary CubeSat missions.

We are building a software-defined, highly flexible and reconfigurable ground station on Macquarie Unversity's main campus that will enable us to communicate with MQube-1 when launched. The ground station, based around Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform, will enable UHF/VHF-communication capability with tracking antennae at the first instance, and capability extended to S-band in the future.

The ground station will be accompanied by our 'Space Operations Centre' based at the ground floor of 50 Waterloo Road, leveraging the high-speed network connectivity between the main campus and 50 Waterloo Road. This will be the focal point of our space operations, where we will manage current space missions and plan future ones.

We are working on establishing procedures and developing a CubeSat payload to assess our novel protocols of "hardening" microorganisms against the conditions of the space environment prior to launch within a CubeSat.

We seek to determine the most effective way to prepare an industrially practical organism to survive completely unpressurised transport in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and ultimately beyond.

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